Back view of a blue-teal cursive script tattoo running down the spine, with a lace garment draped over one shoulder.

Cursive script tattoo down the spine

Lettering · Back · Colour · Photo

A close view of a bare back with a sheer lace garment draped over one shoulder. A long line of cursive script runs down the spine in blue-teal ink, with the words Eternel and a few other French words partly visible. The soft, warm-toned photograph has shallow focus, and the scalloped lace edge frames the tattoo.

Lettering Back Script text Lace Spine

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lace machine in the back room of Madame Verhaeghe's shop had a voice of its own, a clatter that rose and fell with the bobbins, and Agnès had learned to hear a wrong stitch in it before her eyes found it. That winter the order was for a veil, a long one, with a border of eyelash edging scalloped like the sea at low tide, and running down the middle of it a line of script the patron had written out on card in a hand so fine it looked like thread itself.

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The card was wrong from the first word. Someone had smudged the ink where the middle of the phrase should be, and when Agnès held it to the window the letters on either side would not agree with each other. Madame said to copy what was legible and let the lace decide the rest. Agnès did not like that. A thing that could not be read twice was not a thing she wanted her name on.

So she sat with the card until the lamp burned low, and she worked out the missing words the way her father had taught her to find a dropped stitch, by following the pattern back to where it still held. She counted loops. She counted the winters since his boat had gone out past the breakwater and not come home. Then she put a word in the gap that was not on the card at all, a small one, the kind a person says to a child at a door, and she sewed it in with the finest thread in the shop.

In the morning Madame unpicked the border, looked at the line for a long time, and said nothing. The veil went to a bride in Boulogne. Agnès never learned whether anyone read that word, or whether it was only the lace that kept it.