Black and white photo of a woman's upper back showing a black script lettering tattoo reading If I Could Fly, placed between the shoulder blades below the neck.

If I Could Fly script on upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows the upper back of a woman wearing a white low-backed tank top, with her face not visible. A black script tattoo reading If I Could Fly sits centrally across the upper back, below the nape of the neck. The image is in black and white, with clean, slightly italic letterforms and a plain, uncluttered background.

Lettering Back Script Lettering Text Word Woman

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Gideon had the ladder braced against the hoarding on Oldham Street at ten past midnight, a sable brush between his teeth and a tin of size going tacky on the pavement below. The bakery had shut at six and the shutters were down, so the only light came from the chip shop across the road, which buzzed and flickered as if it had a grievance. He was gilding the fascia for a new owner who wanted her lettering to look hand-cut, a little careless, leaning forward as though it were in a hurry.

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His niece Abi sat on the kerb with a flask, counting the pigeons that settled along the lamp housings. "What's the top line say?" she asked. "Sourdough and Sons," he said. "Not that. The bit underneath." He hadn't painted it yet. The owner had written it on the back of a receipt in purple biro: If I could fly, I'd land on your windowsill every morning. Gideon had thought it daft and said so, and she had laughed and said it was a line from a song her father used to hum over the washing-up.

He worked it from the inside, through the glass, because a mirror-letter on the back of a window reads true from the street. Every stroke went down backwards, the loops tilting the wrong way, so that by the time he finished the gold would catch the lamplight out there and the words would come out straight for anyone passing.

When he climbed down, Abi was already on her feet, mouthing the words from the pavement. A pigeon lifted off the lamp above her, and for a moment the whole line seemed to hang there in the cold air before it wheeled away over the rooftops.