Small black fine line script reading semper fidelis on the ribs of a person wearing a grey vest top, shown alongside a black and white version of the design.

Semper fidelis script tattoo on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The collage shows a black script design reading semper fidelis on a white background, a mirrored temporary tattoo sheet on grass, and a close photograph of the lettering on a person's side below the arm. The lettering uses thin, continuous linework with a handwritten feel and no visible shading. The palette is black ink on skin and white or green backgrounds, with the crop focused on the tattoo and the grey top at the edge of the frame.

Fine line Lettering Ribs Script Phrase

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ferry only crosses on Tuesdays when the swell lets it, so you have learned to write letters the way people did before telephones, slowly and without crossing anything out. You sit at the kitchen table with the window open to the smell of wet gorse and write the same two words at the top of the page, then sit looking at them. Semper fidelis. Your father found the phrase in a Latin primer inside a tea chest and said it meant faithful always, though he never settled whether it was a promise or a warning.

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Mrs Halloran at the post office takes the envelope without reading the address. She knows the hand by now. She says the boat is late because the tide is wrong and the skipper is stubborn, and you say nothing, because the sea does as it likes and so do the people who wait on it. Outside, a gull works at a fish head on the slipway, and a child on a bicycle rings the bell at it twice. You buy a tin of peaches you do not want and carry it home in your coat pocket like a stone.

The reply comes on the Thursday boat, in a bag that smells of diesel. It is only a single sheet, folded once. Across the middle, in the careful joined-up hand you would know anywhere, are the two words again, the final letters looped the way he always looped them when he was trying not to hurry. Nothing else. You hold it up to the window to see whether there is writing on the back, and there is not.

You fold it into your shirt and walk down to the slip, where the water is already coming in over the stones, and you stand there until the gull gives up on the fish head and flies off towards the mainland.