Black script lettering reading 'If fate should fail us then hope will see us through' with two black leaf sprigs, tattooed on the side of a ribcage.

Script quote with leaf sprigs on the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

Black script lettering runs diagonally across the side of the ribs, reading 'If fate should fail us then hope will see us through' over two lines. Two small black leaf sprigs sit above the left end of the text and below the right end, balancing the composition. The work is entirely black ink with solid fills and soft grey shading at the edges of the letters, and the photograph is taken in warm indoor light.

Lettering Botanical Ribs Script Quote Lettering Leaves Sprig

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the puddle by the fish cart, it has swallowed better boots than yours, and shuffle in closer, for the rain is coming sideways off the river again and I will not raise my voice for the back row. Now. The Pennick sisters kept a herb stall under the iron gate, and the year the river came up over Crane Lane, it took their stock, their seed sacks and very nearly their mother's kitchen table.

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Ada, the elder, sat on the wet step and counted what was left: four tins of dried bay, a tin of seed gone grey with mould, and a lid her mother had scratched with a nail years before. Round the rim, in careful letters, ran the saying her mother used whenever the stall ran short: 'if fate should fail us, then hope will see us through.' Ada had always thought it a dull thing to say over cabbage. That morning it looked like the only thing in the yard still standing.

So she swept the mud from the sacks, sowed the least spoiled seed in the lean-to yard, and went to bed. Her younger sister Nell laughed at her until the first green leaves pushed up through the silt, two small sprigs, then five, then a whole hedge of bay curling over the broken wall. Customers came to see it. The gardener from the big house paid in silver for a cutting, then the fishmonger, then a man with no coat who said he had been walking since spring looking for something that smelled like home.

Ada never did finish her sums that winter. She kept the tin lid on the counter with the letters facing the street, and when the rain came in sideways she would tap it twice with one finger, the way you knock on a door you expect to be answered. Mind the step on your way out. The bay is still growing behind the gate, and the rain, as you can hear, has not yet given up.