Black script lettering of the Serenity Prayer with two small red flowers and black vines, tattooed along the side of the ribs.

Serenity prayer script with red flowers on the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo is a block of black cursive script reading the Serenity Prayer over four lines of text, set diagonally across the side of the body. Two small red flowers with fine black vine accents sit at the upper left and lower right ends of the text. The linework is clean and even on smooth skin, with the warm, soft-focus background keeping attention on the lettering.

Lettering Ribs Text Script Quote Flower Vine

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Bernard Ailes had been asking for the card since the handover, and by three in the morning I was tired enough to read it to him without looking up. The card was a postcard of Whitby harbour gone soft at the corners, and on the back his wife had written the Serenity Prayer in a looping hand, four lines with a little red flower drawn at each end in a biro she must have borrowed from the bed desk. She had died in March. He kept the card under his pillow the way other men keep a wallet.

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I read it slowly. God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. He mouthed it along with me, a half beat behind, the way children do with a nursery rhyme. Courage to change the things I can. Outside the window a delivery lorry reversed with its beeping going on far too long, and somewhere down the corridor a call bell chimed and went quiet before anyone answered it.

When I got to the wisdom line he stopped me. 'Which one's the difference,' he said. I told him it was the part that asks you to work out what is yours to carry. He shook his head slowly. 'Nell always said I carried things I had no business carrying.' He reached for my wrist and turned the card over so the flowers faced up, the red gone a little brown from handling.

I wrote the words on the whiteboard above his bed before I left at seven, in capitals, so the day staff would see them. Then I stood in the car park while the sky went the colour of weak tea and counted how many things on that list I could actually do anything about. Only one, I suspected, was mine to read aloud.