Large black script lettering reading Attitude with ornate swirling flourishes across a man's upper back, shown from behind.

Attitude script lettering across upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The image shows the back of a man's upper body, with his head cropped out of frame. The word Attitude is written across the shoulder blades in large, bold, black script with thick and thin strokes and decorative scrollwork extending around the letters. The shading is solid black with grey tones, and the plain dark background focuses attention on the tattoo.

Lettering Back Script Flourishes Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the third week of that summer you can tell an honest stroke from a showy one without lifting your eyes from the board. Mr Halloran has taught you to load the brush on the edge of the palette, to pull the long down-stroke in one breath, and to leave the flourishes until last, when your hand has stopped shaking. 'Capitals are for show,' he says, tapping the mahl stick against the trestle. 'The body of the word has to carry the weight.'

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The job that autumn is a shutter for a sweet shop on Leeds Road, the word ATTITUDE in black enamel with gold leaf picked out in the curls, and the customer wants it ridiculous. You spend four days on the swirls alone. Halloran watches from his stool, smoking, and says nothing until the last loop folds back over the first letter. Then he grunts and asks for the size-four liner, and you understand that the hardest part was never the letters themselves.

He dies in February, and the shop passes to a nephew who sells the premises to a vape counter. Before the shutter comes down you go back one wet Sunday with a tin of black and paint a small flourish under the final e, a loop nobody asked for. A woman stops on the pavement with a pushchair, reads the word aloud and laughs at it, the way people laugh at a dog that has learned to talk.

You wait until she has gone. Then you lean into the cold and sign the corner where nobody looks, the way he taught you, and let the rain do what rain does to wood in March.