Black fine line calligraphic script tattoo running diagonally along the side of a person's ribs, against pale skin and a coral top.

Script tattoo running along the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A black script tattoo runs diagonally up the side of the torso, from the lower ribs towards the underarm. The lettering uses thin, flowing strokes with looped ends and small dot-like marks, and it is shown in solid black ink with no shading. The pale skin and white background keep the focus on the tattoo, while a coral top frames the lower part of the image.

Lettering Fine line Ribs Script Calligraphy Lettering Text

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The envelope had been forwarded twice, once from a flat in Bristol and once from a care home in Penzance, and by the time it reached Marnie Oakes the corner had gone soft as felt. Inside was a single sheet folded into eighths, covered edge to edge in a hand that curled back on itself like wood shavings. Her mother had written it. Marnie knew the signature, a plain M, but nothing else on the page looked like language.

Keep reading

She tried the old dictionary her father had left on the shelf, then the encyclopedia, then the man at the second-hand bookshop on Fore Street, who squinted and said it looked like something a monk might have done after a long lunch. Each line ended in a loop that circled back beneath the words before it, and small dots sat where full stops should be. She copied one curl onto graph paper and counted the strokes. Eleven. Her mother had always counted things under her breath when she was nervous.

It was Oskar, the lodger upstairs who taught evening classes in typography, who finally sat with her at the kitchen table. He turned the page to the lamp and said the letters were not a code at all but a private alphabet, the sort a person might invent for a diary the year a daughter was born. He found the key pencilled in the margin of an old Christmas card, a tiny chart of loops with their sounds written beside them. Marnie understood then that her mother had been writing to her in a script built to be unreadable by everyone except the one person who would someday need it.

It took them until dawn. Once the key turned the words over, the letter said that the kettle was on the left hob, that the lemon tree needed watering on Sundays, and that the second drawer in the hall stuck unless you lifted it first. Oskar read it aloud. Marnie laughed until she had to rest her head on the table, and when she looked up the window had gone grey and the first milk float was rattling past below.