Black and grey script tattoo on the ribs reading Each day is a gift and not a given right, framed by a shaded ribbon bow and scrollwork.

Script quote with ribbon bow on ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A shaded ribbon bow sits above a cursive quote, which reads Each day is a gift and not a given right, with a small outlined heart at the lower left. Ornate scrollwork curls down the side of the design, with soft grey shading giving the bow and swirls a slight sense of depth. The tattoo is shown in black and grey on a bare torso in a close side view.

Lettering Realism Ribs Ribbon Bow Scrollwork Heart Script Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit, the kettle is nearly warm, and you may as well hear this before your papers are stamped. You want the story of the blue ribbon on the barrier pole? Then listen, because I only tell it once a winter, and only to people who have stood in line as long as you have.

Keep reading

The ribbon was tied by Mirela Doros, a girl of fifteen, on the morning her brother Tomas was sent over the pass to work the grain barges. She tied it in a neat double bow, the way their mother did with Sunday braids, and she hung a little tin heart from one loop so the wind would turn it. The guard that day was a man called Ferenc, who had no sentiment in him at all, but he left the bow alone, and every guard after him was told the same. Frost curled around the wire beneath it like the scrollwork on a church gate, and the ribbon faded from blue to grey, then to the colour of old bread.

Thirty years went by. The gate was painted twice and the new officers stopped asking why it was there. Then one February a boy came up the road pushing a bicycle with a bent wheel and a letter buttoned inside his coat. Ferenc's successor read it under the lamp. On the back, in a hand gone shaky, was a line Mirela had written to her brother long before: each day is a gift and not a given right. Tomas had died in the south, and the boy was his son, sent home at last with the letter and the grain-ledger number.

The officer lifted the barrier himself, and the bow was still there when the boy rode under it. So when you cross, don't rush the gate. Look up at the ribbon. Then go on, and mind the step, it's slippery in the frost.