Black and white photo of a fine line script tattoo reading "to travel is to live" with a dotted flight path and airplane, on the side of the ribs.

Script quote with airplane on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo is a single line of cursive lettering reading "to travel is to live", with a dotted flight path that loops off the final word and ends in a small airplane. The linework is thin and even, and the ink is solid black with no shading. The photo is black and white, taken from the side, with the wearer's black bra cropping the upper edge of the frame.

Fine line Lettering Ribs Text Quote Script Airplane Dotted line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the time the second post reaches Ferncliffe, you have scrubbed the breakfast urn twice and told Mr Oakes that his kipper is not coming back from the kitchen. The postcard sits against the cruet on table four, face up, a lighthouse photographed in colours nobody in Margate has ever seen. You read the back first, because you always do. Five words in your mother's looping hand, and then a line that trails away from the last one like a dropped stitch.

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She sent the first card the summer you were nine, the summer she left you the keys, the ledger and the cracked dinner gong, and went off with a man who sold encyclopaedias door to door. 'To travel is to live,' she wrote, and you thought it was the cleverest thing you had ever read. It took you years to notice she had written it to herself, and that the little aeroplane at the end of the dotted route had been drawn by someone who had never once stood at a departure board.

Now there are fourteen postcards in the drawer under the bar. This one is from Lisbon, and it says she is thinking of coming back to see the sea. You do not reply. Instead, on the last Sunday of the season, you lock the front door, leave Mr Oakes a note about the gong, and walk to the bus stop with a case that has only ever been packed for the same stretch of coast.

At the top of the cliff road the wind pulls at your coat like an impatient hand. You take out the postcard, turn it over, and read the words once more before tucking it into your pocket. Then you step onto the bus and do not look back at the sign that says Vacancies.