Black and grey typewriter-style lettering reading imagine on the upper back beside the shoulder blade, in a fine line lettering style.

Imagine lettering on upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a bare upper back, with the head and loose hair cropped at the top left and the shoulder at the right. The single word imagine is set in a typewriter-style serif font in black ink, placed just below the shoulder blade on the right. The black and grey tones are soft, with a plain pale background and a simple, uncluttered composition.

Lettering Back Word Typewriter font Lettering

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

Maud had the Olivetti open on the bench before the church bells stopped, its innards laid out on a dust sheet like a clock someone had lost patience with. The ribbon was dry as an old envelope, and the e had gone soft at the top, filling in like a bruise. Mr Haworth stood in the doorway in a grey suit. 'Our Ellen wants it for the breakfast,' he said. 'Her mother typed the speech on this in forty-nine. Can you make it sing?'

Keep reading

She cleaned the type bars with a wire brush and a drop of paraffin, then coaxed a stiff spring back into shape with the pliers she had carried since her apprenticeship. The card Ellen's young man had left on the bench had only one word on it, pencilled in capitals that leaned forward as if they were in a hurry. IMAGINE. No vows, no poem, no name. Maud read it twice before she inked the ribbon, and then she sat for a minute with her hands in her lap, which she never did with a job.

She fed a fresh sheet into the platen and struck the keys one at a time. The i came out clean, the m a little heavier than the rest, the g with its tail dropping neatly below the line. When she lifted the card the letters sat in the paper like small black footprints. Mr Haworth read it and said nothing for a long while, then asked what he owed her, and she told him to read it out loud at the breakfast and call it square.

By nine o'clock the card had been passed from table to table, and Ellen's father had tapped it against his glass until the room went quiet enough to hear the urn. He read the word and everyone laughed, then nobody did, and the card kept travelling. By the time it came back to the top table the corners had gone soft and the ink had been smudged by so many thumbs that nobody could say for certain whether it had been typed or only wished.