Black lettering tattoo of two lines of text running diagonally along the side of the ribs, shown in a close photograph of bare skin.

Two-line quote tattooed along the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows a two-line block of black lettering tattooed diagonally across the side of a torso, with the text running from upper left to lower right. The letters are fine, neat and uniformly black, with no shading or colour. The image is warm-toned and slightly soft, with a person's hair and a hand visible at the top edge, and the subject is cropped so that no face is shown.

Lettering Ribs Text Quote Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Corran had kept the north gate of Hallowmere for eleven winters, and in all that time nobody had asked him what the words above the arch meant. They were older than the gate. Someone had cut them into the lintel before the town had a name, the letters worn so smooth that he traced them with his thumb each dusk when he carried the lamp up the stair.

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The autumn the river froze early, a girl came up the steps with a satchel of chalk and a brass pin. She said her grandmother had been the last lamplighter and had taught her the old hand. She wanted to copy the lines onto vellum for the archive, she said, and she did not look at the wall while she spoke, only at the toes of Corran's boots.

He let her work. She climbed the ladder with her skirts knotted at the knee and wrote the first line in small, careful strokes. Then she stopped and said the second was wrong. The stone said the sword was in the darkness, not beneath it. She had been copying from a broken rubbing, she admitted, and had guessed at the rest.

Corran did not correct her. He raised the lamp so she could see the true letters, and when she came down at last with ink on her fingers, he saw that she had written them differently from the stone, the way she thought a watch ought to sound. He took the vellum from her and held it against the gate's dark timber. "Keep your version for the archive," he said. "The wall will go on saying the other one, and somebody up here needs to hear it."