Black blackletter text tattoo across a woman's upper back and shoulder blade, with a hand adjusting the strap of her grey tank top.

Blackletter quote across upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman's upper back shows a block of black blackletter text set in centred lines, with a shorter second paragraph below. The letters have sharp, dense strokes in solid black ink with no shading or colour. The photo is taken from behind in an outdoor car park, with a hand at the left edge holding the tank top strap and people blurred in the background.

Lettering Back Quote Text Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have ruined the second line, and Mr Ashdown knows it before you do, because he is standing at the end of the bench with his pipe unlit, watching the chips of Portland stone fall into the grass. You put the chisel down. The yard smells of wet dust and the mint that grows between the flags, and beyond the wall a mower goes up and down the lawns of Hollins House as if nothing has happened.

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"Blackletter is a cramped hand," he says, taking the chisel from you and turning it over in his fingers. "Every stroke wants company. You lean the letters on each other like tired men at a bus stop, and you keep the gaps narrow so the eye can't rest. It's meant to be read slowly, by someone standing in the cold." He hands the chisel back and points with his pipe stem at the rough block. The lines are Mrs Hollins's: Let me be patient, let me be kind, and below them the older words about mountains and about being nothing at all, copied in pencil on the back of a seed catalogue and pressed into your hand on Monday.

Mrs Hollins comes down the gravel path at four with her secateurs still in her fist, reads the stone without her spectacles, and goes quiet. She asks for nothing to be changed. She only asks you to cut the last line deeper, the one about love, so the rain will fill it first. You do it one stroke at a time while the afternoon sun swings round behind the medlar tree.

When the light reaches the sundial's gnomon, its shadow lies across the words like a ruled line, and a blackbird lands on the top of the block to inspect your work. You think it approves. Mr Ashdown, lighting his pipe at last, says nothing, which from him is praise.