Fine line black script reading Smile on the side of a woman's ribcage, just below her raised upper arm.

Smile script on the side ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A small black script word reading Smile sits on the side of a woman's torso below her arm. The thin, even linework has a handwritten feel with a looping S and a flowing tail on the final letter. The tattoo is the only colour in an otherwise neutral image of pale skin, a dark top and brown hair, with the tattoo placed low in the frame.

Fine line Lettering Ribs Smile Word Script

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

Dear Nell, Pryce finally wants his name off the fascia above the photographer's on Harbour Row, and since I'm the only sign-writer left in Ramsgate who still loops his capitals, the job fell to me. He gave me one instruction, scribbled on the back of a receipt: put a single word up there, and make it look like someone wrote it in a hurry. I've spent three mornings on a board nailed across two trestles, the enamel going tacky in the damp, trying to get it right.

Keep reading

The trouble is the S. Every version I painted looked like a shout, all temper and capitals, and Pryce kept shaking his head. Then he told me about Ada, his wife, who ran the studio for thirty years. She stood behind every camera calling out to nervous brides and sulking boys, yet when he finally photographed her after she died, he found she had never once let herself be caught without a stiff, polite face. So the word had to be soft. The S should curl back on itself, as if it were still deciding.

On the third morning the rain stopped, and I let the brush run long off the last letter, a tail lifting away like a hand leaving a shoulder. A girl of about seven stopped on the pavement by her mother's pushchair and traced the shape on the wet glass with one finger, lips moving. Her mother tugged her along, but the girl looked back at me, and I swear she was grinning.

Pryce paid me in cash and a cup of tea that tasted of the cardboard it came in. He stood under the awning a long while afterwards, reading the word the way the girl had. Come Monday a bakery will open there, and nobody will remember whose name used to hang above the door. Keep your chin up, love. Dad.