Elvish-style script across upper back
Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo
A photograph of a diagonal line of black script tattooed across the upper back, close to the neck and shoulder. The linework is thin and even, with small decorative flourishes on several letterforms. The image is in colour, with the skin showing a slight pinkish tone and a blurred tiled floor behind.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
You find the note tucked into the lining of the big top's last pole bag, folded so many times the creases have gone soft as cloth. Mr Abernathy has already sent the lions off to a sanctuary in Wales, and the ticket booth has been painted over with a sign for a carpet warehouse. Nobody else has noticed the paper, or nobody else can read the hand it's written in.
Keep reading
It's the leaning, looping script your grandmother taught you on the backs of old programmes, letters that bend like grass in a hard wind. She made you promise never to let the loops go slack. The message is short: the ring is not sold, the ring is walking. Look under the third wagon, where the canvas meets the boards.
You crouch in the mud with a torch clamped in your teeth and pull back a flap of tarpaulin. Beneath it sits the iron ring from the centre pole, a dozen mismatched horse bells stitched to its rim, and beside it a tin of greasepaint with one line written across the lid in the same flowing hand: come back when you can read the rest.
The wind turns and the bells chime, faint as a question. You fold the note back into your coat, and past the hedgerow the lorry's engine catches. You realise you have been reading the words aloud, slowly, the way she taught you, and the wind is carrying each one off across the empty field before you can finish the sentence.
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