Two photos of a black handwritten script tattoo on a person's upper back, one fresh and red, one healed, reading a short message to a mum with a small outline heart.

Handwritten message tattoo on upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo is a handwritten style message in black ink, written in loose cursive script across the upper back, with a small outline heart and a signature line beneath it. The left photo shows the work fresh, with redness and irritation around the lines, while the right photo shows it healed, with the linework softer and more even. The composition is a side-by-side pair of close crops of skin, with no face visible.

Lettering Back Handwritten text Heart Script Cursive

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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

Dot had written the note on the back of a Co-op receipt, the way she wrote everything, pressing so hard the biro dented the card. Ashley found it in her lunchbox on a Tuesday, folded into quarters beneath a cheese sandwich with the crusts left on. Dear Ashley, it said. I love you to the moon and back. Three kisses, and a small heart with a loop on the L, as if her mother had been thinking about the shape of it while the kettle boiled.

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Ashley was twenty and had been at college in Leeds since September, sharing a flat above a launderette where the walls hummed all night. She kept the receipt in her purse for months, through two overdrafts and a bus fare that went up twice. When she finally sat in a chair on Sheffield Road with the needle buzzing away, she asked the man to copy the letters exactly, the rounded A, the lazy crossbar on the t. He traced them from the receipt with a marker and told her to hold still, love, and she did, and it stung less than she had expected.

She never sent the receipt back. She wrote her own reply instead, on a paper napkin in a café by the bus station, and tucked it into the next parcel with a jar of piccalilli and a pair of socks. Dear Mum, it said, I love you to the moon and back, and at the bottom, in a hand she had spent a term perfecting, she signed her name. Three weeks later the parcel came back up the M62 with the lid taped shut. Under the cheese sandwich, cut into triangles for once, was the napkin, and across its back, in fresh biro, Dot had written one line: Got it, love. Mum.