Small black script tattoo on the side ribs of a woman in a white crochet bikini top, with foliage and pale stone behind her.

Script tattoo on ribs in white crochet bikini

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A close crop of a tanned torso in a white crochet bikini top and matching tie-side bottoms, with the face out of frame. The small script tattoo on the side ribs is in black ink, with fine, even lines and the word itself hard to read at this size. The background shows sunlit pale stone, green leaves and wooden boards, with warm natural light across the skin.

Lettering Ribs Script Word Torso

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Harrow Court could read the word Mrs Ellery kept written small on the walls of the stairwell, and she liked it that way. She had come up from the coast in the spring the lifts were condemned, carrying a tin of buttons and a steel rule she never explained. The tower had eleven floors and one working lift, and the old men who played draughts by the bins said she was a witch, because she wrote with a pencil stub and then rubbed the writing out with her thumb.

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The children learned the story at the bins, and it went like this. On the ninth floor lived a boy called Tobias Rook who could not sleep, and every night he heard someone below him saying one word over and over, too soft to make out. He crept down the concrete stairs in his socks and found Mrs Ellery sitting on the bottom step with her pencil. She showed him the word, written so small he had to hold his breath to read it.

He never said what it was. A word you can read out loud in a tower block is a word somebody can take from you, she told him, so you keep it where the lift men won't look. Tobias grew up, went to sea, came back to Harrow Court when the walls were being painted, and found her word still there under three coats of magnolia.

He stood on the ninth landing with a bucket of white emulsion and read it once, and then he went down to the bins and told the children it was only his mother's name.