Black and grey fine script lettering in several lines on the side ribs of a person in black underwear, sitting outdoors on a grey towel.

Small script tattoo on the side ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A person in black underwear sits on a lounger covered with a grey towel, photographed from the side with the image rotated. A tattoo of several lines of small, thin script runs across the side of the ribcage, but the words are too small and soft to read. The tattoo is in black ink with grey shading, set against a blue sky with clouds, a plant and a building behind.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lines you mean to ask about are not a prayer, whatever the boy at the stall told you. He was guessing, same as the rest of us. I wrote them the winter the harbour froze and the ferries stopped, when my mother was still alive to scold me for ink on the good tablecloth. Eleven lines, each one a sentence I could not say out loud to her.

Keep reading

When I brought the sketch to Dorothea in the back room above the chip shop, she sniffed at the spelling and said I'd have to hold still for three hours if I wanted it straight. I held still. She worked on my ribs with a machine that buzzed like a wasp in a jam jar, and somewhere around the fourth line I stopped minding the sting and started counting the coastguard lamps through the window instead.

The words stayed private, which was the point. Nobody on the bus can read them at that size, not without leaning in close, and nobody leans in close here. So I keep them where they are, under the grey towel of my own skin, and on the warm afternoons when I sit out on the balcony with the city stacked up behind me like unopened post, I know exactly what I have said, and I have never once had to say it again.

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