Black lettering tattoo of song lyrics wrapping around the ribs on a side view, with a small bird silhouette in the middle of the text.

Song lyrics tattoo curving across the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo is a block of song lyrics set in a black, serif-style script that follows the curve of the ribs, with lines rising and falling across the torso. A small bird silhouette sits among the lines of text, with the lyrics filling most of the frame. The image is black and grey, with clean, sharp linework against the skin and fingernails visible at the left edge.

Lettering Ribs Lyric Text Script Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hold was already two-thirds full when the wind backed round to the north-east and Dennis Carrow started up the song again, the same four lines he always sang when the nets came in heavy and the deck turned to soup. Nobody aboard the Marjorie Vane knew where he'd picked it up. He said a Lowestoft woman had sung it to him in a chip shop in 1987, and that she'd been crying into the vinegar at the time, which he took as a recommendation.

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Eli was nineteen and had been aboard eleven weeks. He kept his head down over the gutting table and his knife moving, and he did not sing, though his lips moved anyway. A kittiwake had been riding the stern since Shields, tipping its wings into the wind above the scraps the gulls had given up on. Every time the boom swung, it lifted and settled again, as if it had booked the passage.

The net fouled on the third haul. Something under the trawl had a grip on it like a fist, and the winch whined and stopped. Eli was on the warp when the wire snapped back and took the skin off his forearm in a long pink stripe. Dennis didn't stop to fuss. He just sang louder, and the crew came in under him, ragged and off-key, hauling in time to the words. Eli found he could breathe on the second line. By the chorus the net came free with a boot, a sack of rope and a dead conger eel.

They landed at dusk. The kittiwake was gone from the stern, though Eli saw it once more, a grey scrap on the harbour wall, watching the fish boxes swing up onto the quay. He stood on the wet concrete with his arm wrapped in a rag and sang the verse under his breath, getting the words wrong, until the gulls on the pier started shrieking them back at him.