Black and grey photo of a fine line script word tattoo on a person's ribs, with a dark top lifted to the side.

Script word tattoo on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey photograph of a small cursive word tattooed on the side of the ribs, with the dark top held up by a hand at the upper right. The word is drawn in thin, even black linework with no shading, and the lettering sits centrally on the skin against a soft, out of focus background.

Fine line Lettering Ribs Script Word

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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 tide table had hung above the scullery sink since before my aunt bought the house, and nobody had thought to take it down. On the back, in pencil, someone had written a single word in a hand so fine it looked stitched rather than written: happiness. We found it the week the boiler gave out, when Aunt Irene climbed the stepladder to reach the stopcock and swore at the damp.

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The guest who had left it was Mr Abernethy, room four, who came every August for eleven years and never once paid the extra for a sea view. He wrote letters at the kitchen table before breakfast, then folded them into envelopes he never posted. I asked him once what he was working on. He said it was the only word he had never got right, and he kept trying it in different hands to see which one would hold still.

The August he didn't come back, Irene slid the card into the ledger with the unpaid bills. I read that word every time I balanced the books. It looked less like a wish and more like a receipt, something owed that nobody had come to collect.

When the house finally sold, I unpinned the tide table and folded it into my coat. On the train out of Margate I traced the letters with my thumb, the loop of the h, the long tail of the y, and thought that a word you keep trying to write is perhaps only a sign you have not yet finished the sentence.