Fine line black script reading hakuna matata with small flying birds, tattooed across the upper back at the nape of the neck.

Hakuna matata script with birds on the neck

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo reads hakuna matata in flowing black cursive, with the word matata rising above and to the right of hakuna. Several small birds in silhouette are scattered around the lettering, drawn with fine, thin lines. The photograph is taken from behind, with hair visible above the design and a dark garment at the bottom edge of the frame.

Fine line Lettering Back Bird

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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

You climb the spiral stair at Carrick Ness before the lamp is lit, one hand on the cold rail, the tin of letters tucked under your oilskin. Your uncle left it on the chart table with a pencilled note: read these before Thursday's boat. Every letter is postmarked Mombasa, every one written in the same sloping hand, and every one ends with the same two words that you still cannot say without tasting salt.

Keep reading

The first letter is from 1962. It says he has taken work mending nets for a Swahili widow named Mwanaisha, who feeds him rice and laughs at his bad pronunciation. 'Hakuna matata,' she tells him when he frets about the monsoon, and he writes it down, underlined twice, as if it were a bearing he meant to keep. The later letters are shorter. The handwriting climbs the page as if it wants to leave.

At dusk the terns lift off the skerry in a loose scatter, small as flicked ash, and wheel over the water before settling again. You stand at the gallery rail and count them, the way he counted them from the deck of the coaster that carried him home, and you realise the last letter was never posted. It is folded inside the tin, addressed to you.

You read it by the light as the lamp swings round, and the sea goes gold, then black. He has written only: the birds came back over the bay this morning. Tell them no worries. Then you take the pen from the chart table and write the words on the back of the logbook, the second word rising above the first where the page runs out, and the first bird of the night crosses the glass.