Black hand-lettered script reading breathe, shown as a large design on white, a temporary transfer on grass, and a small fine line version on the chest.

Breathe script word tattoo

Lettering · Chest · Black and grey · Flash

The main image is a large black script design of the word breathe on a white background, with a sweeping tail on the final letters. Two smaller photographs show the same lettering as a paper transfer on grass and as a small, thin black line tattoo on the upper chest near the collarbone. The palette is entirely black ink on white, grey and pale skin.

Lettering Fine line Chest Script Word Breathe Lettering

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now sit closer, you lot, because the tent's gone and the wind has nowhere to hide, so I'll have to tell this one loud. Harrow's Travelling Show was down to three wagons and a camel called Mrs Dunn the winter the big top split along its seam. Nobody mended it. They painted one word across the front of the last canvas instead, in letters as tall as a man, and the word was breathe, because Ada Harrow said that was all the crowd would need from us.

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Ada was the wire-walker. She'd been forty feet up every night for thirty years, and her knees had started to talk back to her. Each evening she stood at the platform's edge, looked at the banner with its long tail sweeping off past the last letter, and told herself the same thing. Breathe. Then the drummer rolled, and she stepped out over nothing, and the rope hummed under her boots like a plucked string.

Then one night in Sheffield the rain came sideways, the lamps failed, and she stood on the wire in pitch dark with nobody to see her but the stars through the torn roof. Her heart went like a bird in a box. She could not find the next breath. So she thought of the painted word, the flourish hooking off its end, and she let that tail carry her out, one slow pace after another, until the lamps came back on and the crowd had forgotten to be afraid.

Mrs Dunn is still with us, mind. The banner went to a rag merchant in Leeds. But that long stroke at the end of the last letter is in my ear every time I need it, and that's the whole trick, my darlings. Find your word, let it pull you forward, and then go on breathing.