Black fine line script reading 1 Corinthians 16 14 with a cross running through it, placed on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Corinthians reference and cross on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a small black tattoo on the upper back, near the shoulder blade. The script reads 1 Corinthians, with the numbers 16 and 14 beneath it, and a thin cross passes through the lettering. The linework is fine and even, with solid black ink and no shading or colour, and the design sits centred in the frame against smooth skin.

Fine line Lettering Back Cross Script Scripture reference Number 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

The rain had been coming down Fargate since ten, and by one in the morning I was up a ladder with a mahl stick braced against the glass, laying gold leaf over a shopfront that had belonged to a ironmonger before it was a phone repair. Under the new paint the old lettering kept surfacing like a bruise through powder. Someone had painted a cross there in the fifties, thin and exact, with a verse running beneath it in capitals that had been left to fade. I could still read the numbers. Sixteen, fourteen.

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Mr Teague taught me on a wet January in Rotherham, before I was old enough to shave properly. He made me build every letter from its skeleton first, pencil lines then the ghost of the brush, and he never let me touch a cross until I could draw one blind. A cross, he said, is the only thing on a sign that has to be level with itself. Everything else can lean. He would sit on his upturned crate with his flask and tell me the Corinthians were a quarrelsome lot, which he said was the reason the verse was worth painting at all.

The new owner rang at dawn to ask why I was taking so long. I told him the old sign was staying. I would scrape the name he wanted, lay his gold clean, and leave the cross and its verse sitting underneath the glaze where the light would catch them in the morning.

Before I climbed down I took my smallest brush and wrote a line along the bottom edge of the frame, in gold no bigger than a grain of rice. Let all your things be done with charity. Nobody would read it except the next painter who came along with a scraper and a bad temper, and I liked the idea of him stopping, squinting, and taking his time.