Close-up of the word Believe in black and pink script lettering with swash flourishes below, on the upper back.

Believe script lettering on upper back

Lettering · Back · Mixed · Photo

The photograph shows the word Believe in a bold, flowing script with black letterforms and pink highlights along the upper strokes. Small swash flourishes sit beneath the lettering, and the skin around the tattoo looks slightly red. The image is a close, straight-on view of the upper back and neck, with the background mostly out of focus.

Lettering Back Believe Script Lettering Swash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sign over Okafor's launderette on Tanner Street had gone grey at the edges after nineteen years, so the landlord wanted it redone before the new tenants opened on Monday. I was up on the scaffold at half eleven with a flask of stewed tea and the streetlamps humming orange below me. Nobody else was awake on the street except a taxi idling at the lights and a ginger cat that kept watching my brush as if it might steal it.

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The word they'd picked from a card of phrases was Believe. I thought it was too much for a launderette, but I've painted worse. I laid the black first, the heavy downstrokes of the B swinging out like a rope, then worked the pink into the upper curves, thinning the paint with a drop of linseed until it ran like a sunset somebody had decided to hold still.

A woman came out of the flats opposite in a dressing gown, carrying a bin bag. She stopped under me and read the half-finished word aloud, slowly, the way you read a menu in a language you're only learning. "Believe," she said. "In what?" I didn't have an answer, so I told her the truth, that the new owners hadn't said. She laughed, shifted the bag to her other hand, and said, "Put the swash underneath, then. That's where people look when they've given up."

So I did. Three flourishes curling below the letters like spray lifting off a wave, and by the time I climbed down the sky over the rail yards had gone the colour of weak milk. The paint was still tacky when I left, and by the time the buses started, the word would be dry enough to read through the glass from the top deck.