Black and white photo of a fine line script tattoo reading Smile on the side of a person's ribs, below the arm.

Smile script on the side ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A close side view of a bare shoulder and upper torso shows the word Smile written in a thin, cursive black script below the arm. The linework is delicate and even, with no shading, and the ink reads as crisp black against the skin. The photograph is monochrome and framed tightly, with the tattoo placed low in the lower right of the frame.

Fine line Lettering Ribs Smile Script Word

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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

Dear Ondine, the sorting hall on Tessaly Ring has finally given up the last of the old crates, and I thought you would want to know what was inside the one stamped with your grandmother's initials. It was not the ledgers we expected. Under a folded tarpaulin there was a bundle of paper strips, each no wider than a finger, and every one bore a single word in that looping hand she used when she was tired of being careful. Most were ordinary. Bread. Tuesday. Shut the door. Then there was a run of them, forty or fifty, that said only Smile, written again and again as if she had been practising the shape of it.

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I took the strips to the reading room under the dome, where the light is kind to faded ink, and laid them out on the long table in the order of their creases. The oldest was brittle at the folds and had a coffee ring across the middle. The newest was crisp. Between them the handwriting loosened, then tightened, then loosened again, the way a voice does when it is trying to keep steady on a bad day. I asked the old archivist, Mr Okafor, what he made of it. He said people wrote things on their skin in the years before the relays, when paper was dear and you could not carry a notebook into a bath or a shift at the foundry. He said some of them wrote their promises there, so they could read them when they looked down.

I have not told the board. I am sending you one strip, the freshest, the one with the ink still dark. Hold it up to the window. The S has a little tail that doubles back on itself, exactly like the one you drew on the back of my hand the summer before you left. Go on, look at it. I think she was telling herself the thing she most needed to hear, and I think it worked.