Black and grey script lettering with scrollwork tattooed along the side of the ribs, reading a line of scripture across several lines.

Scripture lettering along the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A close side view of a multi-line script quotation tattooed down the ribs, with the words set in flowing, connected lettering. Fine scrollwork flourishes sit around and between the lines, shaded in black and grey with bold strokes on the main letters. The skin is lit softly against a pale background, and a raised red and pink top sits above the tattoo.

Lettering Ribs Script Lettering Quote Scrollwork Scripture

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The damp had lifted the gold off the chapel board again, so by Tuesday I had scraped the whole verse back to bare grey wood and was working out the first line in pencil at the kitchen table. Mrs Gillies had brought the old board round in a barrow, wrapped in a feed sack, and asked me to match it letter for letter. My father painted it in 1978, the winter the roof came off in the gale, and there was no one left on Skerrymore who could make the loops the way he did.

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I worked from the photograph pinned above the shop sink, the one with the boats behind him. Nobody had warned me that the flourishes were the hard part. The capitals wanted a steady wrist, but the swashes around the words wanted a kind of giving up, a lifting of the brush at the end of each stroke so the line ran out on its own. I spent three evenings on the F of Faith alone, and each time the tail curled left, like a boat coming about in a poor wind, and I scraped it down again.

On the fourth night the stove went out and I sat in the dark with the brush still wet in my hand. I thought about his sable quills in their tin, which I had never once asked him to lend me, and the way he used to say a line knows where it wants to go if you stop telling it. So I stopped. The last word came in one pull, the shade thickening where the bristles pressed, and when I held the lamp to it the loop of the h stood open like a door.

Mrs Gillies hung it the next morning and read the verse aloud with her glasses on the end of her nose. She said it looked just as it always had, and I let her think it was him.