Black and white photo of a fine line script tattoo reading Aime-moi pour ce que je suis, running along the collarbone towards the shoulder.

French quote in script along the collarbone

Lettering · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph shows a handwritten-style French phrase, Aime-moi pour ce que je suis, in thin black ink across the upper chest and top of the shoulder. The linework is fine and even, with the letters slightly slanted and the words spaced along a single horizontal line. The person's face is not shown, and the subject wears a strapless lace top against a dark background.

Lettering Fine line Shoulder Quote French text Script Phrase

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every night after the lamplighters had gone, Anselm sat at his scrivener's table under the arcade in Lyon and wrote for people who could not write for themselves. Most wanted something grand: promises, mostly, in ink that would be read aloud at weddings and then folded into a drawer and forgotten. He charged by the line and never asked what the words were for, because the answer was usually in the way the customer's hands shook.

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One wet November a woman came in with her shawl pulled over her hair and set a folded paper on the table. She did not sit. She said she had written the sentence three times and each time it had come out sounding like someone else. Anselm unfolded it. The first attempt was crossed through, the second was smudged, and the third was a single line in a careful, shaking hand: Aime-moi pour ce que je suis. Love me for what I am. Under it she had written nothing, which he understood to mean the rest of the story was not his business.

He asked whether she wanted it in capitals for a sign or in the looping hand the notaries used. She shook her head and said she wanted it written the way a person talks when no one is listening. So he took the thinnest nib he owned and let the letters lean, the way a person leans when they are not sure of the ground beneath them, and the words ran along the page without hurrying.

When he slid it back across the table she read it with her lips moving. She paid him the exact coins for the line and not a centime more, then tucked the paper inside her glove and walked out into the rain without her shawl, as though she had already decided she would not need it.