Back view of a person with black and grey blackletter lettering across the upper back, a rose tattoo on the upper arm and knuckle lettering on the raised hand.

Blackletter back piece and rose on upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A person is photographed from behind with one arm raised to the head, showing a black and grey rose tattoo on the upper arm and small lettering on the knuckles. Across the upper back is a large blackletter-style inscription with a smaller line of script beneath it, and a further design curls over the right shoulder blade. The soft, warm-toned photograph keeps the focus on the ink against pale skin.

Lettering Upper arm Back Hand Rose Lettering Script Blackletter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Gull Ferris had a brush of gold leaf between his teeth when the widow came down the slip at Porthgwidden, black crêpe pinned to her hat and a cracked tin of paint under one arm. She wanted her husband's cutter repainted before the Sunday tide, the old black letters the fishermen's grandfathers had used, the kind that looked like they had been cut into a gravestone rather than brushed onto a hull.

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Gull worked the capitals over three nights by lamplight at the back of the chandlery, each stroke hard-edged and tapering the way his own father had taught him on hulls and headstones. She had written the names on a torn sheet of ledger paper: her two sons, lost in the February gale, and beneath them a short line in her own round hand that he had to read twice before he understood it. He kept the spacing tight so the words would hold together from the quay, and he added a fine hairline swash to the final letter because she had asked for something that would not wash out.

She came back on the Saturday, climbed the ladder without help, and ran her gloved thumb along the wet black. It came away smeared and grey.

"The S is leaning," she said.

Gull began to apologise, but she shook her head and pointed at the pale ribbon of paint where the old name had been scraped away. "They'll read it from the water," she said. "That's all it needs to do." Then she handed him a coin, nodded once, and walked back up the harbour wall with the tide already turning behind her.