Close photograph of two lines of black blackletter-style lettering tattooed across a person's ribs, with a shop interior visible behind.

Two lines of blackletter text on ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo is two lines of dark black lettering in a blackletter style, running horizontally across the side of the torso. The letterforms have bold strokes and angular, pointed terminals, with solid black ink and no shading. The photo is taken close and slightly from behind, with the skin filling most of the frame and a blurred shop interior at the edges.

Lettering Ribs Text Blackletter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mirror hung in the ladies' waiting room at Carrow Bridge for longer than anyone could say, and the letters cut into its oak frame ran backwards, so the porters had to stand on the far side of the glass to make them out. Old Harriet Venn, who swept the platform for forty years, said the words were a plain instruction once you turned them round. Nobody believed her, and nobody thought to check.

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Tom Ashby came to the station the winter his brother went into the river at the weir. He worked the night signals and he could not sleep, so each evening before the last train he stood in front of the mirror with his lamp. The glass showed him the signal box as it had been, his brother at the lever with the kettle singing behind him, whistling something badly. Tom stood there until the lamp guttered and the train was gone.

Harriet found him there one night and sat down on the bench beside him. The glass doesn't show what is, she told him, it shows what you want, and it will keep showing it until you stop feeding it. Read the words the right way round, aloud, and then walk out onto the platform without looking back. He asked her what the words said. She told him to read them and find out.

He did. The letters came clear as he spoke them, and when he finished he saw only himself, tired and grey under the lamp, and behind him the empty bench. He walked out onto the platform. Behind him the glass frosted over, and the 6.10 came in out of the dark with its lamps lit and nobody at the lever.