Grey arched lettering with swash tails across the upper back, reading Mississippi, on a sunburnt back.

Arched lettering across upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A close view of a person's upper back showing arched lettering in a grey ink with ornate, serif-style letters and curled swash tails at each end. The letters are filled in with shading and sit above the shoulder blades, following the curve of the word. The skin around the tattoo is noticeably sunburnt, and the rest of the frame is plain skin with no other marks.

Lettering Back Lettering Script Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Gather in, gather in, and mind the mud by the big top, for I have a tale about letters and the river that gave them their shape. Sit you down on those crates. Now, the summer the Harrow and Pike show came up the old levee road, there travelled with us a sign-painter called Tobias Quill, who could make a word sing if you gave him a brush and a bad night's sleep.

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The owner wanted a banner over the ticket booth, and he wanted the name of the great brown river arched above the gate like a rainbow that had been to finishing school. Quill took three days over it. He chalked it, rubbed it out, drank gin on the bottom step of his wagon and cursed the swash tails until the ride boys came round to watch him fail. On the third night the river rose a foot and the canvas went damp, so he painted the whole word in grey, shading the underside of every letter, until it seemed to lift clean off the cloth.

The owner paid him in free tickets, which he tore up and fed to the stove, and then he tried to have the banner taken down. The word was too grand, he said. Folk stood under it gaping and forgot to buy their bread-and-dripping and their candied apples. Quill said nothing. He climbed the ladder with a pot of ink and a rag and rubbed one letter back to bare cloth, then another, until the sign read only the first half of the name, and the owner had to admit the gate looked poorer for it.

So here's the thing I tell the children. That banner came down the autumn we folded the tents, and Quill kept the offcut. Every evening, when the lamps are lit and the wind comes off the water, you can still see the word moving on the canvas, grey on grey, the way the river moves under a bridge. Mind you, I'm old, and I'll swear to most things after a pint.