Black lettering tattoo across the ribs in handwritten script, reading you were given this life because you were strong enough to live it.

Three-line script quote on the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo is three lines of handwritten-style script in black ink reading "you were given this life because you were strong enough to live it". The lettering has even, monoline strokes and the lines are slightly staggered and run across the side of the torso. The skin tone is warm and the photo is lit from the right, with a black and white geometric patterned garment visible above the tattoo.

Lettering Ribs Quote Script Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every morning before the lamplighters had finished their rounds, Ada Pell unlocked the back door of the bakery on Tanner's Row and lit the ovens with the same three matches. The bakehouse smelled of wet stone and yeast. Nobody in the village knew how old she was, only that she had come up from the coast the winter the mill burned down, carrying a flour sack that never seemed to empty.

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That winter the river froze and the carts stopped. Tom Hadley, who drove the bakery's round, sat on an upturned crate and told her he was finished. His wife had gone to her sister's, the children were coughing, and the loaves were going stale in the window. Ada didn't argue. She took a stub of chalk from her apron and wrote on the inside of the oven door, in letters as even as stitching: you were given this life because you were strong enough to live it. "Read that while you're shaping the rounds," she said. "Then tell me it isn't true."

He read it every morning for a month, mouthing the words over the dough. By March the cart was out again, the children were back at school, and the chalk had worn to a grey ghost on the iron. Ada had gone back to the coast by then, or so people said, though the back door was still unlocked at three each morning and the ovens were always warm when Tom arrived.

When he repainted the door in spring, he wrote the line again in black, a little wobbly at the edges, and left the flour sack on the step for whoever came next. It was still heavy, and it still smelled of wet stone.