Black and white photo of a person seen from behind, with a large back tattoo of script and roses and tattoos on the upper arm.

Back piece with script and roses

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of a person seated cross-legged and seen from behind, with the head bowed and one hand raised to the head. The back is covered in a large tattoo with flowing script lettering, rose-like flowers and ornamental linework, with further tattoos visible on the upper arm. The shading is soft and greyscale, and the composition is framed by a patterned fabric and a window at the top.

Lettering Botanical Back Upper arm Script Rose Flower Ornament Back piece Lettering

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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

Gerald Foy taught me to pull a letter the way you'd draw a thread from a hem, slow and without looking at your hand. We were on the third floor of a damp warehouse off Ancoats at half past two in the morning, the gas heater ticking, the window above us full of sodium orange from Great Ancoats Street. The client wanted a line of script across a florist's shutters by seven, and the paint would not cure in the cold.

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Gerald had a rule that the lettering comes first and the flowers come after, because a rose can be forgiven for being a little crooked but a word cannot. So I lettered 'come undone' in long, looping capitals while he watched from his stool. Then he sent me for the tin of red and the fine brush with the squirrel hair. I painted the roses in the gaps between the words, five petals each, the outer ones curled back as if they'd been handled too many times. Gerald said nothing, which from him was praise.

Near five the shutters started rattling as the market lorries came through, and a man in a hi-vis vest stopped below to light a cigarette and read the half-finished board. He asked what it meant. Gerald said it was for the shop, not for him, and the man laughed and said it was the best answer he'd had all week.

We finished as the sky went the colour of weak tea. Gerald wiped his brushes, I stood back with my hands in my pockets, and the letters ran along the metal in a line that looked, for once, as if it had always been there. He signed nothing. He never did. I still walk past that florist on the way to the bus, the roses are still red, and nobody has ever asked me who painted the words beneath them.