Small black lettering tattoo reading stet on the side of the ribs, in a simple lettering style, with a hand in a red plaid shirt lifted beside it.

Stet lettering on the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a small black word, stet, tattooed on the side of the ribcage. The lettering is thin and uniform in weight, set in a plain print-style script with solid black ink and no shading. The skin is lit evenly against a red and blue plaid shirt that is lifted at the top of the frame, and a hand with painted nails rests at the right edge.

Lettering Ribs Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Margaret had been correcting galleys at the Harrowgate works for thirty-one years, and in all that time she had never once been able to leave a dropped comma alone. So when the new man, Terry, slid the page across her desk with a single stanza struck through in red, she read it twice before she noticed the note in his cramped capitals in the margin: STET.

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"That's the Hollins poem," she said. "He wants the last verse gone."

"Author's own request," Terry said, not looking up. "Says it's sentimental."

She looked at the struck lines. Eleven of them, about a canal boat named for a drowned sister and rowed out every August to meet the tide. It was sentimental. It was also the only thing in the whole anthology that sounded like someone had been awake when they wrote it.

Margaret took the pencil from behind her ear, drew the little hook under the deleted words, and wrote stet in her own square hand, the way the old compositors had taught her: let it stand. Terry frowned at her over his glasses. She shrugged and tapped the margin twice. The printers would set it in the morning, and the boat would stay on the water.