Black handwritten script tattoo reading What We Do In Life and Echoes In Eternity across the side of the ribs.

Two-line quote in script on the side ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A two-line quote in black, handwritten-style script runs diagonally across the side of a torso. The linework is solid and even, with no shading, and the lines are slightly angled upwards from left to right. The skin tone and soft natural light make the ink stand out clearly against the plain background.

Lettering Ribs Quote Script Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down where the grass is cool, and mind the windfalls, they bruise if you tread on them. My grandmother's father planted this orchard the year the railway came through the valley, and he planted it facing the old quarry wall, because he said a man should plant where his voice can come back to him. He was a stonemason, quiet as a shut door, and the only words anybody ever heard from him were the ones he cut into the lintel of the press house: what we do in life, echoes in eternity. Nobody knew where he got them. The schoolmaster said they came from a play, the vicar said a dead Roman, and my gran said they came from her mother's mouth, which settled nothing.

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The summer the blight came and the apples went black on the bough, his son Tobias stopped speaking to him over a sold field. Three years of silence in a valley where every sound bounces off that quarry. Each evening the old man walked to the wall and called his boy's name, and the echo came back flat and empty, like a coin dropped in a jar.

Tobias came home in September, the week the last of the Bramleys dropped. He stood at the wall and didn't shout. He whistled instead, the two notes they used to call the dog with, and the rock threw them back across the orchard. From somewhere among the trees, a low whistle answered, the same two notes, and nobody had taught it to him but the stone.

That's the whole of it. The wall still gives back what you give it, and the press house still has its words. Mind your step on the way out, there's a Bramley under that bush with your name on it.