Black lettering tattoo reading Strength, with a small cross above the T, on the side of a person's ribs.

Strength script with cross on ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a black script tattoo reading Strength on the side of a torso, with a small cross crossing above the letter T. The lettering uses smooth, flowing linework with some variation in line weight and no shading. The image is in black and grey tones against warm skin, with a hand wearing a ring resting at the top edge of the frame.

Lettering Ribs Strength Script Cross Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Right, sit down, the kettle's on and the ward is quiet for once, so you'll have the time. Mind the chair, it wobbles. My grandmother Ada worked nights on the Cottage Hospital in Hebden, forty years of them, and she used to say the word on the wall was the only thing in the building that ever did any good. Her ward sister had stitched it onto a sampler in brown thread, STRENGTH, with a little cross above the T so the night staff would see it when they came round with the trolleys at three.

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The sampler hung above the nurses' desk for years, and nobody read it, the way nobody reads a sign they pass every hour. Then came the winter of the flu, when Ward Four had eleven beds and two nurses, and a porter named Dennis Carrow who could not carry a tune but could lift a grown man off a cold floor on his own. One night a boy of nine came in with a fever that would not break, and his mother sat by the bed holding his hand, and Ada found she had nothing left to say to her. So she pointed up at the sampler.

The mother looked at it a long time. Then she said, "It's only a word." And Ada said, "It is. But somebody had to sew it, and somebody has to read it at three in the morning." The mother laughed, the first laugh in days, and that was what got the boy's temperature down, or so Ada always swore.

Dennis took the sampler home when the ward closed. He had it framed, and it hangs in his kitchen still, and every morning he reads it aloud before he puts the kettle on. You can do the same if you like.