Close crop of a person in a white crop top and pink cardigan, with black script tattoo on the upper chest and a small tattoo at the side of the waist.

Devanagari script tattoo on the chest

Lettering · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

The photo is cropped from the chest to the thighs, showing a black ink script tattoo on the upper chest between the collarbones, set just below a gold chain necklace. A smaller black tattoo sits at the side of the waist above grey ribbed trousers, and a further dark mark is partly visible under the neckline of the white top. The tattoos are in black ink with grey shading against a plain white wall, and the subject's face is not shown.

Lettering Chest Ribs Script Necklace

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The customer wanted the words copied exactly, stroke for stroke, from a card her mother had kept in a biscuit tin for thirty years. I said I could do it. I could not read a single letter of it. Mr Bhandari at the paint shop on the Uxbridge Road told me the top line of every Devanagari word hangs like a washing line, and that the tails should be left open so the eye keeps moving along.

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I worked on the shopfront glass through three nights in March, lying on a sheet of cardboard under the sign with a torch in my teeth. The card was soft at the folds and smelled faintly of cardamom. Each morning I rang Mr Bhandari from the van and read him the shapes down the phone, and each morning he corrected one curl, a little hook I had drawn like a question mark when it should have been a full stop.

On the last night the shop had shut and the road was empty except for a number 18 turning at the lights. I finished the final letter, the one the card had been rubbed thinnest at, and stood back with the brush dripping onto my boot. Nobody passing would know what it said. That was the point, she had told me on the phone. It was for the one person who would.

The paint was still wet when the streetlamp came on. The open tails caught the orange light and held it, and for a minute the whole line looked like it was being written again from the other side of the glass.