Small black fine line script tattoo reading Smile on the side of the torso below the arm, with a couple of moles nearby.

Smile script on the side ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a small handwritten word, Smile, in thin black script on bare skin at the side of the torso, just below the arm. The linework is fine and even, with a loose, cursive flow and no shading. The ink is the only colour, and the word sits low in the frame against soft, pale skin.

Fine line Lettering Ribs Smile Script Word Handwriting

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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

Telegrams were charged by the word in those days, sixpence for the first ten and a penny for each after, so nobody sent a sentence they could not afford. I had worked the counter at the Hull telegraph office for nineteen years and could tell a man's marriage from the way he counted his words on the brass rail. Mrs Ada Pardoe came in on a wet Tuesday in March with one slip of paper and a purse held shut in both hands.

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She had written a single word and crossed out four before it. I read the slip upside down, the way you learn to. It was addressed to the trawler Mary Ellen, somewhere past the Spurn, and the word was Smile. No name, no sign-off, nothing about the gale that had been sitting over the Dogger all week.

I asked if she was certain. She said her husband had never once in twenty years sent her anything without a complaint folded inside it, and she wanted the last word he had from her to be a kind one. I told her a word that small would cost a shilling. She gave me the shilling and a second one besides, and I tapped it out myself, with the care you use for anything you know will be read aloud in a wheelhouse.

The Mary Ellen came in on the Friday with her nets torn and her skipper grey in the face. He read the flimsy standing under the gas lamp, twice, the way a man reads a letter he expects to be bad. Then he asked me, very formally, what a word cost going the other way. Two shillings, I said. He laid them on the counter, wrote one word on the back of a form, Home, and pushed it across to me. I sent it at once. It was the only time in nineteen years I tapped a message out and felt my own face doing what she had asked for.