Fine line black script tattoo reading Strength on skin, with a teal ribbon running through the middle of the word.

Strength script with teal ribbon

Fine line · Mixed · Photo

A close photograph of the word Strength written in thin, flowing black script across pale skin. A slim teal ribbon runs vertically through the letters between the r and the n, replacing part of the lettering. The linework is clean and even, and the lighting is soft with a shallow focus on the text.

Fine line Lettering Strength Ribbon Script Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The teal twine was my mother's idea, though she never admitted it. She dyed a single hank of it in the copper at the back of the net loft the winter the Marigold went down off the Tarn bank, and she said any mend made with that colour would hold longer than the rest. Nobody believed her. Dad laughed at her for a week, then started asking for it by name.

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By the time I took over the loft, the hank was down to a fathom and a half. I used it sparingly, on the seams that took the worst strain, the cod-end and the bridle where the warps bite. Skipper Gerald Pell brought his net in every Thursday with a fresh tear and told me to use the teal, as if it were lucky, and I let him think so.

The February gale caught the fleet off the Nab. Pell's Serene Mary came home with her starboard net torn to ribbons, and he sat on an upturned creel with his cap in his hands while I sorted the frayed cord. I worked the last of the dye into a long splice, row by row, and sewed the seam shut with the stuff he had never let me waste. Nobody asked me to. He just watched the needle go in and out.

When the nets went back on the boats the following week, someone had painted STRENGTH in white letters over the loft door, the way the chapel sign used to read. Pell had done it, with a brush far too big for the job. The strand of teal I had left hanging beneath the word had gone pale in the wind, and nobody took it down.