Black and grey photo of dense handwritten lettering being drawn across a bare back, with a hand holding a pen and a dark tattoo visible on the forearm.

Handwritten lettering across a bare back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a bare back covered in dense, handwritten lines of text, with a hand holding a fine pen or stylus at the upper left. The lettering is drawn in dark, fairly uniform linework, and the text runs diagonally across the skin. The image is monochrome, and a dark tattoo on the forearm of the hand holding the pen is partly visible.

Lettering Back Forearm Lettering Handwriting Text Pen Back

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ink was the wrong kind for skin, Marguerite said, and she used it anyway because the letters had been sent to her in ink and she would not translate them into anything else. Her hand was steady when she started. By the second page of the letter it had begun to shake, and she made Tomasz wait while she drank the tea he had made in a mug from the Hastings boarding house, the one with the chipped handle that had been her mother's.

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The letters were from her brother, who had gone to sea in 1963 and sent four pages a month for eleven years, then stopped, then sent one more from a port whose name had been smudged by weather. She had read them so often the folds had gone soft. Tomasz asked her what she wanted written, and she said everything, and he said that was not a sentence he could work with, so she took the first envelope out of her coat and began to read aloud.

He wrote over the lines as she spoke, in a hand so fine that from the doorway it looked like shadow. Somewhere around the seventh page she stopped reading and simply talked, about the ferry, the wind off the Solent, a dog that followed her brother to the quay. When he had finished the last line on the small of her back she asked him to read it back to her, and he did, and she laughed at the bit about the dog.

She kept the final envelope unopened. It was the only one he had not answered, and she said she would read it when the skin had healed, and not before.