Black and white photograph of a woman's bare back with a fine line script tattoo running down the length of the spine, from the neck to the lower back.

Fine line script tattoo along the spine

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with her hair pinned up is photographed from behind against a plain pale background, her bare back and shoulders in view. A thin, cursive script runs in a single unbroken line down the centre of the spine, with the lettering partly legible. The black and white photograph uses soft, even lighting that emphasises the fine black linework and the curve of the back.

Fine line Lettering Back Script Handwriting Spine Text Quote

Find an artist for this

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

Sit closer, the fire is only warm for those who lean in. No, Brother Tobias, you will not make out the words from there, and nor would the bishop when he came up the hill with his boots full of rain. Nobody has read the whole of it. That was the point of old Ansgar.

Keep reading

Ansgar copied for forty winters in the scriptorium above the Tyne, and he had one rule the abbot hated. He would not lift the pen from the vellum. Every letter ran into the next, one thread of ink from the first word to the last, so a reader could only follow it by turning the roll slowly across his knees. By the time he reached the end his neck ached and he had forgotten the beginning. The abbot called it vanity. Ansgar said a sentence that is never interrupted is the only kind nobody can steal halfway through.

In his last winter the abbot climbed the stairs himself to see the finished roll. He unspooled it across the bench, and the lamp guttered, and he began to read aloud, slowly, the way you would walk a boundary stone by stone. Halfway down the letters thinned and blurred against the grain of the skin. He stopped and bent closer. The roll ran on past the edge of the wooden spindle, and the last few words had been written onto the bare hide of the rod itself, where the ink had soaked into the grain.

When the abbot rolled it up again his thumb came away black, and it stayed black for a week. He said nothing about it at chapter. He only asked, afterwards, that the cellar lamp be kept lit through the night for a man who had not finished his sentence.