Black lettering tattoo of the HTML tags </head> and <body> in a bold sans-serif font, placed on the back of the neck, with a khaki cap and grey top visible.

HTML head and body tags on the neck

Lettering · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows the back of a person's neck, with the tattoo reading </head> on one line and <body> on the line below, set in a bold, blocky sans-serif typeface. The letters are solid black with clean edges and no shading, and the lines are centred on the neck below the hairline. The background is a plain pale wall, and the person wears a khaki cap and a grey top.

Lettering Neck Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Marguerite,

Keep reading

The pass closed on Tuesday and the innkeeper has given me the back room over the kitchen, where the flue keeps the damp off the walls. I have been here four days with nothing to do but the thing I came to finish. You will laugh, but I have been writing the marionette a proper set of instructions, the way Father taught me to lay out a hymnal. Every section must open and close, he said, or the whole page falls down.

The head is done. I carved it from the pear tree that came down in the August storm, and I fixed the jaw with the brass hinge from the old mill clock. Last night I closed its section properly, with a little wooden slat that marks where the skull ends. Then I sat looking at the empty space below it, which is the body, and I could not think how to open it without feeling I was lying to the wood.

This morning the landlady's boy came up with coal and asked what I was writing on the board. I showed him. He read it out slowly, the way children read anything with brackets in it, and said, "So the head goes first, then the body starts after." I told him that was the trouble. A head is only finished when something agrees to carry it.

I think I will open the body tonight. The snow has stopped and the stars are out over the yard, and the puppet is leaning against the window with its face turned to the lamp as though it is listening for the carriage bells. Tell Father the hymnal lesson held. Everything closes, in the end, and the important part is the line you write next.

Yours in the frost, Tobias