Two photographs of black hand-lettered script tattoos, one on the back of a thigh above the knee and one on a lower leg near the ankle, both shown upside down to the viewer.

Black script lettering on two legs

Lettering · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

Two close photographs show black script lettering tattooed on bare legs, one on the back of the thigh near the knee and one on the lower leg near the ankle. The letters have a simple, slightly uneven brush-like linework with solid black fill and no visible shading. The ink is black on a plain background of skin, carpet and bedding, with the lettering reading upside down from the camera's angle.

Lettering Thigh Calf Script Text Lettering Leg

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ruth Ambler had painted shop fronts in Hebden Bridge for thirty-one years, and she knew that every letter was a small lie told backwards. A good signwriter learns to work in reverse, so the words come out true from the pavement. So when Mr Halliwell came up the steps of the workshop with a folded sheet of greaseproof paper and asked for two short lines, she pulled her stool closer and didn't ask why he wanted them mirrored.

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"Plain black," he said. "Brush, not gold. And they're to read upside down from the far side of the canal."

She laid the paper flat on the bench and wrote the words the way they had to be written, the tails curling the wrong way, the M lifting like a gull. Ten minutes later the first line sat drying on the board, reversed and crooked: I'M FINE. The second she had to pause over, because it was not a phrase she expected a man of seventy-four to want painted on anything. SAVE ME, she wrote, with the same careful pressure, and she blew the ink dry.

Mr Halliwell paid in coins and left without looking back. The next morning Ruth walked the towpath with a flask of tea and found the spot. Across the water, on the sill of the blue house, his wife Edna was standing at the window with a hand over her mouth, reading the words the right way round. Then she laughed, and the sound came across the still canal like a bell.