Black linework tattoo across a person's upper back, showing large blackletter letters, a skeletal hand holding blades, and smaller lettering, in a lettering-led style.

Blackletter lettering and skeletal hand on a back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph of a large black linework tattoo across the upper back of a person whose head is cropped out of frame. The design combines large blackletter letters with a central skeletal hand holding two pointed blades, plus smaller script and blackletter letters at the sides. The tattoo is in black ink only, shown against bare skin with a white shirt pulled down over the shoulders.

Lettering Back Blackletter Letter Blade Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, the urn's still warm and nobody leaves this hall before I've finished. You all remember Mr Dunmore's art room, the one that smelt of turps and wet paper, and the bony hand he kept in a biscuit tin on the top shelf. He told us it belonged to a sign writer who went blind painting the Wellington Arms in 1931. Every name over every shop on Ferriby Road came out of that hand's two quills, he said, and the hand never forgot a single letter.

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Dennis Hale sat by the radiator and wanted that tin more than he wanted his dinner. He had letters in his head he could never get down on paper: a fat black L for his mam, a crooked F for the girl at the chippy who never once looked up. One Friday after the bell he lifted the tin down and carried it home under his blazer. He painted those two letters on the back of his dad's van door, and the next morning the van was gone, and so was the chippy girl's name from the window, and nobody in Ferriby could say how.

Thirty years on, I drove past the Wellington Arms and saw Dennis's dad's old sign still bolted above the door, the paint gone grey. The black letters stood up straight as ever. Underneath them, in small curling script, someone had written the words he'd always wanted to say. The hand was still holding its two quills, and it was still waiting for someone to ask it nicely.