Blue handwritten lettering tattoo across the upper back reading how your body still remembers things you told it to forget.

Handwritten quote across upper back

Lettering · Back · Colour · Photo

Six lines of handwritten text in dark blue ink run down the upper back, reading how your body still remembers things you told it to forget. The strokes are thin and fairly even, with a loose, slanted hand and some irregular spacing between words. The skin is pale with a few small moles, and a dark strap from a top is visible over the shoulder against a plain background.

Lettering Fine line Back Quote Text Handwriting

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Danny,

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Your dad's lamp is still on the sill where you left it, the brass gone green at the seams, and I don't dust round it any more. Mrs Pringle from the top row says I'm keeping a shrine, which is rich from a woman whose husband has eaten his dinner in the same chair for thirty years. You wrote that the foreman's job in Reading has six-hour shifts and lights that never go off. Good. I'm glad. But you also wrote that you finally sleep through the night, and I'd like to know who told you that was the same as sleeping well.

The pit closed in March. The buses to Blyth run half empty now, and the men stand at the shelter in their good coats as if someone will come along and say the cage is ready. Your Uncle Stan still wakes at four with his boots already on, sits on the edge of the bed in the dark, and waits for a bell that stopped ringing before you were born. He says his body won't believe it. He says he's told it a hundred times that the shaft is shut, and it still counts the minutes down.

Last night I woke with my hand stretched across to your side of the bed, feeling for a lamp cord that isn't there. So come home at Christmas and bring that sensible Reading head of yours. Leave the lamp where it is. Something in us keeps what we were told to forget, and I'd rather it was you coming up the lane with a light in your hand than an empty room with the door left open.

Love, Mam