Fine line black script tattoo reading still i rise, with a thin stem, two leaves and a small flower bud, on the side of a person's ribs.

Still I rise script with a flower on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo reads "still i rise" in cursive script, with the words joined by a thin continuous stem that runs across the skin. A small flower bud with two leaves sits at the right end of the stem, and a single leaf sits beneath the word "still". The linework is fine and black, with light grey shading in the flower, and the design sits horizontally across the side of the torso.

Fine line Lettering Botanical Ribs Script Flower Leaves Quote Stem

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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

Brother Anselm kept the walled garden at Saint Ebba's for thirty-one winters, and in all that time I never once let a rose die on my watch without a fight. The one against the south wall had been cut back to a grey stump by the hard frost of the year the abbot's brother came to die in the infirmary. Nobody expected anything from it, least of all me, but I wrapped its roots in sacking and sat with it through the sleet anyway.

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In March I found a green thread on the stump, no thicker than a bootlace, running along the old bark in a line as straight as a ruled margin. Where it bent it put out two small leaves, sharp at the tips, and at its end a bud no bigger than my thumbnail. I showed it to Brother Cyril, who said the stock had been grafted badly and would die by midsummer. He said it with his hands folded, the way he said most things.

That night I took the seed ledger and copied out the words the old prioress had painted above the refectory door before the roof began to leak: still i rise. I wrote them in a slanting hand and joined each word to the next with a line, so the whole phrase ran like the stem itself. Then I went out in the dark, tied the stem to a cane with flax thread, and talked to it about the weather, which was foul.

By June the bud had opened into a flower the colour of weak tea, its petals grey at the folds. Cyril came out to scold me for wasting a good cane and stayed to look instead. He didn't speak. He bent and touched a leaf with his thumb, the way you'd check a child for fever. That evening he took the ledger from my table, wrote the words again beneath mine in his square capitals, and pressed a fresh cutting from the stem into wet earth beside the wall.