Close-up of two small handwritten script tattoos, reading Still and Beautiful, on the side of a torso above and below a skin fold.

Still and Beautiful script on the side

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows two small lines of handwritten script on the side of a torso, one reading Still above the other reading Beautiful. The linework is fine and slightly uneven, with thin strokes in dark ink. The ink appears black or very dark, and the soft, pale skin tones dominate the composition, with the tattoos placed near the centre of the frame.

Lettering Fine line Ribs Word Handwriting

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every Thursday the rain came down on the cloth market at Thornbury Cross, and every Thursday Mrs Ada Pell set her little table under the awning of the wool hall and wrote words for people who could not write their own. She wrote letters to sons in the navy, disputed bills for widows, and once a love note half in Welsh and half in gravy.

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One grey afternoon a young woman came in out of the wet with a shopping bag soaked through at the bottom. She asked for two words and no more, and she did not say what they were for. Ada dipped her steel nib, which scratched when the ink ran thin, and asked her to say them slowly. "Still," the girl said. Then, after a long while with the rain loud on the canvas, "Beautiful." Ada wrote the first word in a looping hand, lifted the nib, and wrote the second beneath it. The table rocked on its short leg, so the last letters leaned a little, the way a person leans into a wind.

The girl read the card, folded it twice, and asked the price. Ada said a penny, the same as always. The girl put down two pennies anyway and asked whether ink would last. Ada said ink lasts as long as the paper, and paper lasts as long as somebody keeps it. "And skin?" the girl asked. Ada said she had never written on skin in her life, and the girl laughed for the first time that day and said she supposed she would have to find someone who had.

Ada never learned whether the words held. She kept the spare penny in a tin beside the nib box. On the wettest Thursdays, when the canvas sagged and the gutters ran over, she thought of the girl walking off through the puddles with the card held under her coat, carried the way you carry a thing you mean to keep dry.