Black script tattoo reading Strength, with a small cross through the T, on the side of the ribs.

Strength script with cross on ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of the side of a torso showing the word Strength in black flowing script, with a thin cross rising through the letter T. A hand with a ring rests across the upper chest at the top of the frame. The linework is fine and even, in solid black ink with no colour, and the tattoo sits centrally in the lower half of the image.

Lettering Ribs Strength Cross Script Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The road out past the salt flats had no name on the map, only a number, and Mother Ada swore it was the only honest road in the county because it never pretended to go anywhere. She told the story sitting on the step of the petrol hut, her hands folded over a tin cup, while the sun went down behind the dry lake the colour of old brass. You want to hear about the word, she said, and not the woman who carried it? Fine. The word came first. It was written on a card pinned above the till at the hut, in a curling hand that kept sliding off the line, and the card said STRENGTH in letters so fancy the customers had to squint.

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Nobody knew who had written it. The hut's owner had gone east years before and left the card behind with a jar of pencils and a calendar stuck on March. Every traveller who stopped for water read it aloud, some of them laughing, some not. A long-haul driver called Teodor once tried to copy the letters onto his arm with a biro, and got as far as the T before his nerve went. Ada said the T had a little cross going up through it, thin as a hair, and that the cross was the only part of the card that looked like it had been drawn in a hurry.

One night in a dust storm a girl walked in off the road with nothing but a torch and a bag of wet socks. She stood under the card for a long time, reading it over and over, and then she laughed and said her gran used to write that on the back of every birthday card. Ada gave her tea and asked nothing. In the morning the girl was gone, but the card had been turned face down on the counter, and when Ada turned it back over there was a single line of new ink under the word, very neat, saying only: it was never the cross that held anything up.