Black fine line lettering in a French script runs vertically down the centre of a woman's upper back, above a strappy beige top.

French script down the upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with dark hair is photographed from behind, showing a vertical line of black script tattooed down the centre of her upper back. The thin, cursive lettering appears to be French and is only partly legible in this frame. The skin tone is warm, the background is a soft beige plush toy, and the photo is taken at close range with natural light.

Lettering Fine line Back Script Quote French text Handwriting Woman

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain has been coming sideways across the Dover lanes since four, and by half past six the queue for the Calais sailing has folded back on itself like a concertina. You are the one with the stamp and the torch, so the envelopes come to you. Most are dull: invoices, a crumpled booking, a child's drawing of a ferry with too many windows. The woman at the front of the line hands you a single sheet of pale blue paper, written in fountain pen, and the officer behind you is already tapping his watch.

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You ask her what it says, which you are not supposed to do. She tells you it is a line her mother wrote on the back of a calendar in 1989, the last thing she sent before she moved to England, and that she has carried it across more borders than she can count because she never learned the ending. You tilt the sheet under the lamp. The ink has bled where the wet got to it, so the final word is a dark smudge, like a plum that has been dropped and not yet bruised through.

You read it aloud slowly, the way Madame Lefèvre taught you at school in Rouen, one word at a time. The blue sky is now. You stop there, because the rest is lost, and you are not going to invent a mother's sentence at half past six in the morning. You say the sky is blue now, which is what it says, and it is the most foolish and kindest translation you have ever given.

She folds the paper into her passport and thanks you as if you have handed back something heavier. You stamp the page. Beyond the glass the cloud over the Channel tears open for a moment, white and sudden, and the queue starts to move.