Black fine line script reading happiness on the back of a woman's neck, photographed from behind with her hair in a bun.

Happiness script on the back of the neck

Lettering · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A woman seen from behind, with her hair tied in a loose bun and one hand raised to her head. The word happiness is written in thin, black, cursive script on the side of her neck, with crisp linework and solid black ink. The plain pale wall behind her keeps the focus on the tattoo and the dark top she is wearing.

Lettering Fine line Neck Script Word Lettering Neck

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Ada Pryce had been lettering the shop windows of Hollin Street for thirty-one years, and she never painted a word she had not first tried on the back of a bread wrapper. Mornings she mixed her gold size in a saucer and sat on an upturned crate with the door propped open for the light. When the new baker's order came in, the card said only: one word, cursive, small enough to sit beneath the sill. The baker had not said what it was.

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She practised it four times on the wrapper before she was satisfied. The loop of the h had to lean the way a person leans into a wind, and the long tail of the p needed to trail without wavering. Her hand was steady the morning she painted it, though a boy had come in twice that week asking whether she did the other sort of lettering too, the sort for headstones. She told him to mind his own business and kept her line true.

When the baker came to see it, he stood on the pavement with flour still dusting his forearms and read it twice without speaking. Then he asked the price, and she named it, and he counted the coins out on the sill one at a time. Only later did she learn that he had copied the word onto a slip of paper and kept it folded in his apron all that winter, unfolding it only once the ovens had cooled.

By spring the gold had worn thin at the edges, but the black outline held. Ada wiped the glass every Monday and always paused at the final letter, which she had drawn a little longer than it needed to be, so the word would have somewhere to go.