Fine line black script tattoo reading be brave, have courage, be strong on the side of the ribs, with a finger resting at the edge of the frame.

Three-line script quote on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

Three lines of handwritten black script read be brave, have courage and be strong, set in a slightly diagonal stack on the side of the torso. The linework is thin and even with no shading, and the ink looks dark and crisp against the skin. The photograph is warm-toned, with a sparkly backdrop and a finger at the right edge of the frame.

Fine line Lettering Ribs Quote Word Courage

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The stove had gone out twice before Davie learned to coax it back without asking anyone, and the cook, Mrs Ross, said nothing about it except to put the kettle on again. The boat was the Brightwater and she rolled the way a drunk man walks, all sideways and sudden, so the pots swung on their hooks and the flour went wherever it pleased.

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On the third night of the gale Davie stood at the galley table with his hands in the dough and his face the colour of cold porridge. Mrs Ross took a stub of carpenter's pencil from behind her ear, tore a strip from a ration chit, and wrote on it in letters as thick as fishhooks. Be brave. Have courage. Be strong. She folded it twice and pushed it into the bib of his oilskin, then went back to the bread as if she had only passed him the salt.

Davie didn't read it until the next watch, when the sea had flattened a little and the cabin smelled of wet wool and scorched onions. The paper had gone soft from his sweat, and the pencil had run where it pressed hardest, so the last line looked as if it were leaning into a wind.

Years later, with a galley of his own in Aberdeen, he asked her why she had written three lines rather than one. She said one line was for the sea, and the other two were for the boy holding the bread. He never worked out which of them she meant, and that, she told him, was the point, so he would keep reading.