Fine line cursive lettering tattoo across the lower back above a pair of jeans, with only part of the words legible.

Cursive script tattoo on lower back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black cursive script tattoo runs horizontally across the lower back, with only part of the words legible where the image is cropped. The thin, even linework and solid black ink sit on warm skin, and the blue denim waistband in the foreground frames the lower edge. The photograph is taken at close range with a soft vignette and a blurred interior behind the subject.

Fine line Lettering Back Script Lettering Quote

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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

Mr Aldous Feeney had lettered every shopfront on Gull Street for thirty-one years, and he could tell a customer's trade by the width of his vowels. The widow Ada Pyke came in on a wet Tuesday with a folded sheet in her glove and asked for a board that would say what her late husband used to say over the counter. She had written it out in pencil, carefully, in a schoolgirl's slope: While there is life there is hope.

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Aldous fetched a length of seasoned pine from the back shed and ruled his guidelines in chalk. He sat the first capital on the grain and worked the loops with a sable brush and a pot of black enamel thinned with turpentine. Cursive wants to run downhill if you let it, and the hairlines had to hold their weight the whole length of the board. By Thursday he had reached the third word and the pine was nearly full. He had misjudged by a hand's breadth, as a man will when his mind is elsewhere.

So the last word bent round the corner of the frame onto the bare edge, where no one on the pavement would read it. Ada came for the board at dusk and asked to see it hung. Aldous stood her in the doorway with the lamp behind her, and she read it aloud, stopping at the break. 'Is life, there is,' she said, and then, lower, 'hope.' She gave a dry laugh and said her husband would have called it a poor joke and bought two copies.

Aldous hung the board as it was and never repainted it. Passers-by stopped to read the front, then walked round the corner to finish the sentence, and a good number came back the next day to say they had found the rest.