Vertical black script tattoo running down the side of the ribs, with fine, slightly broken strokes in black ink.

Vertical black script on the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph of a vertical line of black script characters running down the side of a person's ribcage, with a dark top and denim jeans visible. The characters are drawn with thin, tapered strokes and some small dots, and the ink appears solid black with no shading or colour. The tattoo sits centrally on the side of the torso, with a dark indoor background and a reflected shop sign behind it.

Lettering Ribs Script Character Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tide had already turned when the relief boat failed to come, and you stood at the gallery rail with the signal lamp cold in your hands, counting the flashes Mr Ashdown had left you in his crooked column of marks. He wrote everything top to bottom, the way the old Admiralty charts ran, so that a man reading by lamplight on a windy night would not mistake one word for the next.

Keep reading

The first line was the date, the second the wind, the third a single dot he always made heavier than the rest. You had teased him about it once, years back, and he had only tapped the page and said that one is for the sea, it wants to be seen. Below it the entries grew shorter. Fog bank east. Light steady. Gull on the rail, did not leave. Then a gap, then one stroke, sharp as a pen lifted in a hurry.

You understood the stroke. Three nights earlier he had gone down the iron stairs to fetch paraffin and had not come back up, and the rope ladder to the rocks still hung where he had left it. You lit the lamp, turned the great lens by hand because the clockwork had seized, and wrote beneath his last line in the same vertical hand, steady: Light kept. Relief sighted at dawn.

At first light a grey hull nosed out of the murk, and the boatman climbed up with a crate of tinned peaches and a letter. The letter said much the same as your own log, only longer. You read the column again from the bottom up, the way he would never have wanted it read, and found the dot at the foot of the page, small and dark, where you had not expected to see anything at all.