Close view of a small fine line black script phrase and a thin vertical line motif on a woman's upper chest, with a blue cardigan partly open.

Fine line script and motif on chest

Fine line · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows a woman's upper chest with a cardigan held open, cropped so no face is visible. A small phrase in thin black script sits above the cleavage, appearing reversed as in a mirror selfie, and a slim vertical line motif with a looped curl sits lower down near the centre of the chest. Both tattoos are rendered in black ink with fine, even linework against warm skin, and the composition is tightly framed on the body.

Fine line Lettering Chest Script Phrase Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gilt had to go on backwards, from inside the glass, so that the street would read it true. I had the N and the A done and was halfway through the O when Ruth Haskett came up the step with her hat in her hand and asked for something smaller, a line to sit beneath the name. "Just two words," she said. "He'll see them when he comes in off the tide, and he'll know who wrote them."

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I asked her what the words were. She glanced at the street and then at my brushes, and said only that they were the ones her father used to say over the nets. I mixed a little black for the fine work, since gilt would be too loud for it, and drew the sable out to a point. The letters came slowly, each stroke pulled from the wrist the way the old men did it. Backwards, of course, so that when she stood on the far pavement the words would be waiting for her the right way round.

She paid me in coins still warm from her glove and walked off towards the harbour without looking back. Three days later a man with a salt-burned face came into the shop asking for the sign-writer. He stood in front of the window for a long time, then pressed his palm flat against the glass, over the reversed letters, as if he meant to read them through his hand.

I had put them on the inside, where no gull or hard weather could reach them. That was the trick of it. Anything that faces the room is kept.