Black and white photo of a vertical line of runic-style lettering tattooed along the side of a person's torso, in a fine line lettering style.

Vertical runic lettering along the side of the torso

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph shows a vertical line of black runic-style characters tattooed along the side of a person's torso, with the text running from the upper back down toward the ribs. The lettering is crisp, with solid, even black ink and clean linework. Soft hair and a knitted fabric are visible at the edges, and the skin is smooth and lightly lit against a plain background.

Lettering Fine line Ribs Rune Lettering Text

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, at this wedding, and stop pretending you can't hear me over the fiddles. Old Aud was the rune-cutter in the fjord towns, and she never carved a single thing she couldn't read backwards. That's the trade. Wood takes a mark the wrong way round, so you learn to think in mirrors or you learn to go hungry.

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The year her nephew Ketil came of age, he asked her for a line to run down the side of his sister's new boat, from the gunwale to the keel. Not a blessing, he said, a promise. Aud sat with him three nights by the stove, scratching on a scrap of whalebone, and every time he spoke a word she made him say it again slower, so he would know its shape before it was cut.

On the morning of the launch, the sister stood on the slipway and read the line from the bow, going up in her head letter by letter, the way you do when something matters. She reached the last mark and stopped. Then she laughed, which nobody expected, and said her brother had carved her a question instead, and she would answer it on the far shore.

Aud never told Ketil what the question was. She only said the boat came home, and that every spring after, someone in that family traced the line with a finger before they went to sea, just to feel the shape of it, and found it read the same from either side.