Black ink tattoo of five vertical columns of Thai-style script across the upper back.

Five columns of script on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

Five thin vertical columns of fine black lettering in an ornate Thai-style script run down the upper back. Each column has small pointed flourishes at the top and bottom, with the characters drawn in clean, even linework. The ink is dark and crisp against pale skin, and the tattoo is centred on the shoulder blade area.

Back Script Lettering Column Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lettering ran down the forward bulkhead of the Marrow Ledger in five straight columns, and nobody aboard could read it but me. Ruth had taught me the round Thai letters from a cracked slate in the seed vault, the way her grandmother had taught her, and I had never believed I would need them. Now the docking authority at Halden Reach wanted the inscription translated before it would open the customs gate, and the ship's mind had politely pointed at me.

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The custom was to read the columns right to left, so that each line answered the one beside it. I worked through the first night with a stylus, a lamp that kept dimming, and a cup of barley tea going cold at my elbow. The first three columns were a plea for clean air and steady water. The fourth listed routes. Nothing in them frightened me until I reached the small pointed flourishes at the foot of each column, which the old masons used to mark the end of a sentence.

The fifth column was not a charm at all. It was a roll of names, each one followed by a year, and the years climbed the hull towards the present like rungs on a ladder. Below the last name the mason had left a clean space, the width of two characters, with a single flourish waiting above it. I sat with the stylus over that gap for a long time. The docking authority could wait. The space was clearly meant for someone who had not yet boarded.

I wrote my name there, one letter at a time, copying the shapes Ruth had drilled into me, and the lamp flickered once as if it approved. When I finished I added the year, then drew the little flourish above it so the line would close properly, the way the masons always did.