Black and white photo of a black lettering tattoo reading Do I dare disturb the universe across the nape of a neck, with hands holding hair above it.

Handwritten quote on the back of the neck

Lettering · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of the back of a person's neck, with both hands holding dark hair up and back. A line of black handwritten-style lettering reads Do I dare disturb the universe, sitting horizontally across the nape with a small mole just below it. The ink is solid black with no shading or colour, and the dark background keeps the focus on the tattoo and the skin.

Lettering Neck Quote Word Hair Hand Neck

Find an artist for this

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

Gerald from the parish council pinned the notice to my gate with two clothes pegs, as though the wind might otherwise carry the yew away before anyone could object. Its roots had cracked the wall between my garden and Hollin Lane, and on Tuesday it was coming down. I read the notice at the kitchen window with my tea going cold. I read it four times. The words kept looking back at me as if I were the one who ought to say something.

Keep reading

Ted planted that tree the spring we moved in, a cutting from a churchyard in Ludlow that he had no business taking. He talked to it while he watered, and he kept a battered copy of Eliot in the shed, with a pressed fern marking the page where a man frets about his hair and his trousers and whether he has the courage to speak. Ted used to read that poem aloud when the hedge needed cutting, daring the hedge to answer back. He has been dead nine years, and I have not once cut anything in this garden that he planted.

On Monday I went out before the dew had lifted, secateurs in my apron pocket, the saw leaning against the water butt. A blackbird scolded me from the wall. I stood under the branches with my hand on the trunk, rough and cool, and said the line out loud because nobody was there to hear me say it badly. Do I dare disturb the universe. The blackbird went quiet. I put the saw back against the butt.

By dusk I had taken a single cutting, a finger's length of green with a heel of older bark, and set it in a jam jar on the windowsill. Gerald can have his Tuesday. The roots, when they come, will be pale and thin as wet thread, and I intend to be there to see them. Ted would have said that was the only sensible way to disturb anything.