Black and white photo of a blackwork-style lettering tattoo reading NORMAL PEOPLE SCARE ME across the upper back below the neck.

Block lettering quote on upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The photo shows the back of a person's neck and upper back, with hair tied up and a dark top worn off the shoulders. The tattoo is three lines of bold, uneven block capitals in black ink, reading NORMAL PEOPLE SCARE ME, set centrally between the shoulder blades. The image is black and white, with soft natural light and a plain, slightly blurred interior behind the subject.

Lettering Back Text Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Agnes Dunmore had kept the gatehouse at Carrick Lowe for twenty-two years, and in that time she had learned to trust the tourists who arrived in a muddle of anoraks and sensible shoes. It was the tidy ones she watched. A couple from Harrogate came on a Tuesday in September, matching fleeces, a guidebook folded to the right page, and asked whether the Lady Maud walked on Thursdays. Agnes said she had never seen her on any day at all. They laughed politely, and that was what made her hands go cold on the till.

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She was sure of it by October. Ordinary people read the plaques, photographed the portcullis from the wrong side, and bought fudge. They never climbed the north tower to stand in the wind and look at the sea, and they never asked why the chapel floor had been relaid in a pattern nobody could account for. Agnes had walked that floor every morning for decades. She knew which flagstone rocked. She knew the bell rope in the bailey hadn't been pulled since the sixties, yet visitors kept telling her they had heard it ring.

On the last Friday before winter closures, a boy of about nine came up the spiral stair on his own. Agnes followed with a torch because the handrail was loose. He stood at an arrow slit, watched a heron on the moat, and said, "Do you think it's scary here?" She opened her mouth to say no, the way she always did.

Instead she said, "Only the normal ones." The boy considered this, nodded as though she had finally said something sensible, and took her hand. They went down together, past the rocking stone and the silent rope, to where his mother was waiting in the car park with the engine running.