Black script lettering tattoo running down the side of a woman's ribs as she lies on a beach towel in a white bikini.

Script tattoo along the ribs on a beach

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A woman in a white bikini lies on her side on a towel, with her blonde hair and an arm covering much of her face. A fine black script tattoo runs vertically along her side over the ribs, with the lettering only partly legible at this size. The warm sand, a striped towel and a pink bikini worn by a second person in the background give the shot a bright, sunlit feel.

Lettering Ribs Script Text Beach Bikini

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Oakes had lettered every fascia on Marlow Sands for forty years and never once been asked for a sentence longer than the name of a boat. So when Mrs Pettigrew came down the shingle with a folded paper and a tin of shortbread, he set down his brush and squinted at her handwriting as if it owed him money. "Down the side of the hut," she said. "Upright. As fine as you can go. And nothing too cheerful."

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I mixed the black while he worked, because he would not let me near the brush until the ground was right. He ruled a pencil line the length of a tide table, then a second a hand's width away, and the letters came slowly, each one leaning the way the wind leaned on that coast. Behind us the sun lay flat on the sand, and a gull kept walking up and down the breakwater as if it had lost something there.

The words were not hers. They were her husband's, copied from a postcard he had posted from Lisbon in 1978, which she had never shown anyone. Oakes read them once under his breath, then went quiet and said the sea would take the hut before the paint did, and that was the only reason he'd agree. He wrote them out in a hand so small I had to crouch to follow it.

The last mark was a full stop he drew with a single dab, and he said it was the only part that would ever really be hers. When we finished, Mrs Pettigrew paid in coins, tucked the postcard into her cardigan and walked off towards the car park without looking back at the paint. Oakes wiped his brush, wrapped it in oiled rag and said, "She'll read that every morning and never once see the joke." I asked him what joke. He only shrugged and reached for his tea.