Black script lettering reading 'to love another person is to see the face of God' with a small cross, tattooed across the ribs.

Script quote with cross on ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph of a two-line quotation in black cursive script across the side of the ribs, with a small cross at the end of the first line. The linework is smooth and even, and the letters are solid black with no shading. The skin is lightly reddened around the tattoo, and a red garment and green fabric sit at the top of the frame.

Lettering Ribs Quote Script Text Cross

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Orla Venn reached the ferry-stone at dusk with a sack of smoked eels on her back and found the boatman, Tobiah Crane, sitting on the wet step with his head in his hands. The river had risen in the night and swallowed his landing. He would not take her across, he said, unless she could tell him what she was looking for, because the last three who crossed had come back talking to empty air.

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She told him it was her brother, Idris, who had gone east to the glass towers for work and sent no word in two winters. Tobiah spat into the current. The towers across the water kept their windows whole, he said, and the people in them could summon the dead out of the salt and make them answer. Men went there looking for faces and came home with nothing but their own reflections.

Orla unknotted the sack and laid the eels on the stone so the smell reached him. "My mother used to say you can see the face of God in anyone you truly love," she said. "I never believed her. I'm not looking for God. I'm looking for the one face I can't picture any more, and I'll know it when I see it, because I loved it first."

Tobiah took the eels, grumbling, and rowed her over in the grey light. On the far bank a man was crouched at a fire, turning a fish on a spit, and when he looked up she did not recognise his face at all, only the way he held his hands open towards her, the way Idris had always held them when he had nothing to say.