Close photo of a fine line teal and blue awareness ribbon above black script lettering reading With pain comes strength, on skin.

Teal ribbon and script quote tattoo

Lettering · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a teal and blue awareness ribbon with its loops above a line of black cursive script reading With pain comes strength. The ribbon has shaded blue and purple tones, while the lettering is solid black with some softer grey edges. The design is centred in a tight crop on plain skin with little surrounding detail.

Lettering Ribbon Awareness ribbon Script Quote Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lettering on Mrs Abbott's shopfront had been flaking since the winter, and by the time I got the ladder against the glass it was past eleven. Hartley Street was empty except for the bus shelter's humming light and a cat picking through the bins outside the chip shop. I had my brushes in a tin, a pot of sign black, and a scrap of paper with the sentence she wanted, written in a hand that wobbled on every descender.

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She had asked for the old words back, the ones her husband painted over the door in 1978 before he took the job on the rigs and never came back to finish the ribbon. With pain comes strength. I thought it sounded like something off a calendar, but she said he meant it as a joke about his bad knee, and she never settled which part was the joke. I worked the cursive slowly, thinning the stroke on every downward curl, while the teal ribbon she had sketched in the margin waited for me to decide its colour.

I mixed the teal from marine green and a drop of ultramarine, then shaded the loops with a violet that would fade first in the sun, the way she said the best paint always did. The black dried glossy and the blue went matte, so the whole thing looked like it had been there for years already. By two I was packing up, the cat gone, the street wet under the lamps.

At dawn she came out in her dressing gown and stood on the pavement. From inside, the letters in the glass read backwards, so she had to step back and turn her head to read them the right way round. She nodded once, slowly, as if somebody had finally answered a question she had been asking the window for forty years.