Black script lettering reading individuality, tattooed across a person's shoulder, with a soft-focus background.

Individuality in script on a shoulder

Lettering · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows the word individuality written in flowing, joined script in black ink across the top of a shoulder. The linework is bold and even, with the loops of the capitals and descenders extending into the surrounding skin. The image is a close, slightly angled shot against a plain, dim background, with the ink as the clear focal point.

Lettering Shoulder Word Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sable brush had gone stiff in its jar, so Tomas worked it soft between his fingers and waited for the boat to stop rocking against the slipway. Across the harbour gulls were fighting over a split bag of chips. Mrs Ferrier stood above him with her arms folded, watching his hands the way she watched the tide tables, as though he might get something wrong on purpose.

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She wanted one word on the stern of the Margaret Ann. No port of registry, no painted anchor, no numbers. Tomas had lettered boats on Harrow Island for eleven summers and he knew the rule: you wrote what the owner gave you and you did not argue with the spelling. The word was on a folded paper in her cardigan pocket. She had not let him see it until he was down in the boat with the pot of black enamel open at his knee.

He unfolded it and read it twice. Individuality. Her husband Ray had called it the only thing worth owning, she said, and then he had spent forty years on the same boat, working the same grounds, never once going anywhere else. "Write it how he'd have said it," she said. "Slow, like he was complaining."

So he did. He let the joined strokes run, hooked the capital I like a gaff, and let the final y drop past the waterline so it would catch the light on the swell. The brush hardly lifted. When the last stroke was dry he sat back on his heels and looked up at her. Mrs Ferrier read it with her lips moving, the way she read the tide tables. Then she laughed, short and surprised, and took a coin from her purse. "Ray would have hated it," she said. "Good. Paint it on the other side too."