Black and grey script lettering of the Serenity Prayer running diagonally across skin on the side of the ribs.

Serenity Prayer script tattoo along the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

Six lines of black cursive script read diagonally across the skin, reproducing the words of the Serenity Prayer. The lettering uses smooth, even linework with solid black strokes and no shading, and the lines step down from top left to bottom right. The photograph is black and white, with soft focus and a plain light background.

Lettering Ribs Script Lettering Quote 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

Sit down, the lot of you, and keep your hands off the water-tins, because the old woman is going to talk and she will not start twice. You want the story of the Marrow Dock, the one where the shipwright's daughter read the wall? Right. Listen.

Keep reading

The Dock had been dead eleven years when Ilse Varga came aboard with a stylus and a bad temper. The ship's mind had gone quiet after the reactor scram, and the crew had argued for months over whether to burn the last of the fuel to limp home or sit still and wait for a rescue nobody believed in. Ilse had no opinion on fuel. She had an opinion on the corridor panel. Someone had scratched words into it years back, six lines sliding down the metal toward the floor like a stair, and nobody could read the slanted letters without squinting.

She read them aloud to the men fighting over the ration ledger. God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, she said, and the courage to change the things I can. Then the wisdom to know the difference. Her voice was flat as a dock plate, and the men stopped shouting.

So they sat on the cold deck, each line lower than the last, and they sorted the problems into their two heaps. Burn the fuel or sit still? Sit still, they agreed, because the reactor was not theirs to talk into anything. The recyclers? Those they could mend, and did, with Ilse's stylus pricking her palm the whole night through. By the time the beacon answered, the corridor was full of people reading the wall, and not one of them could say who had carved the words first.