Black lettering tattoo of the words she believed she could so she did in a typewriter style, set in a vertical line on the side of the ribs.

Typewriter quote on the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A stacked quote reads she believed she could so she did, one phrase per line, in a typewriter-style serif font. The letters are solid black with clean edges and even spacing, and the ink sits on a fairly flat area of skin along the ribs. The photograph is a close crop with a dark lace top and a grey fabric draped across the frame, so the black text stands out against the pale skin.

Lettering Ribs Quote Text Word Typewriter font

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit in closer, the rain is loud on the awning and I've only the one voice left for the telling. This was the Saturday market by the canal, the year the bridge flooded. Ada Pell set her black typewriter on a trestle between the eel man and the mending woman, and for a penny she typed letters for anyone who could pay and couldn't write their own.

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Most of them wanted the same things. A letter to a husband gone north to the mills, a letter to a landlord about the damp. Then came Mrs Harker, who held her umbrella over her head like a shield and said she had a son in the army and no word of him since the spring. She dictated slowly, and Ada's keys clacked over every word. Three Saturdays running Mrs Harker brought the same letter, and each time it was a line shorter, as if the grief were wearing it down.

On the fourth Saturday she didn't come. Ada waited through the drizzle until the eel man began pulling down his awning, then packed the machine away. Under the roller she found the last sheet she'd typed, and in the margin, in pencil, a note in a shaking hand: tell him I believed he would come home. Ada sat with that a long time. Then she wound in a clean card and typed four short lines, one under the other, and pinned it to the awning pole where the rain couldn't reach it.

The card's still there, if you go looking. The ink has gone soft at the edges, but the words stand up straight, each one set where she meant it to be.