Black and white photo of fine line script reading serendipity along the ribs, with a smaller word tattooed on the wrist.

Serendipity script tattoo on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of a torso partly covered by a black bra, showing the word serendipity in thin, cursive fine line script running diagonally across the ribs. A small single word in similar script sits on the wrist of a hand resting on the stomach, which has white painted nails. The linework is delicate and uniform, with no shading or colour, and the framing centres on the lettering.

Fine line Lettering Ribs Hand Script Word Lettering

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 ferry from Harwich docks at the drowned station at ten past six, and you are the only clerk left who remembers when timetables were printed on paper. Your job is to log what the tide brings in: bottles, single shoes, the odd sealed letter with a stamp from a country that no longer has borders. Most mornings the sea gives you nothing you did not expect.

Keep reading

Then, in March, a glass jar knocks against the bollard with a strip of paper inside. The ink has run and softened, but the word is clear, written in a thin looping hand that leans as if it is walking downhill: serendipity. Someone has copied it out again and again down the length of the paper, each one a little smaller than the last, until the final copy is barely a pencil mark.

You carry it to the back office and hold it under the lamp. Nobody in this century writes like that, and nobody has needed to. You spend the afternoon comparing it with the ledgers, the wartime cards, the banns pinned in the chapel porch. None of them match. You are about to file it as unidentified when you notice a faint second line beneath the smallest copy, so pale you almost miss it: found by someone who was not looking.

You log it. Then, because the light is going and the last ferry is late, you walk down to the water with the jar in your coat and pick up a flat grey pebble. On the wet sand you write the word again, leaning it downhill the way no one ever taught you. When the tide comes up over the second i, you are already turning back towards the station, and a gull lands on the bollard where the jar was, and somewhere along the pier someone whistles, as if they were expecting you.