Black italic script lettering reading 'If the words you spoke appeared on your skin, would you still be beautiful?' on a plain white background, shown as a tattoo design.

Italic quote lettering design

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

The image shows a line of text set in a flowing black italic script on a plain white background, forming a question in four lines. The letterforms are solid and even with fine hairline strokes and no shading, so it reads as a design drawing rather than a photograph of skin. It is entirely black and white in tone with a centred, balanced layout.

Lettering Quote Script Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dad came up the shaft at six with the pit still in the lines of his neck, and before he had found the soap he was telling Mam what the deputy had said to him in the cage. I was at the sink with my sleeves rolled, scrubbing the enamel pan, and I kept my back to them the way I'd learned to.

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Mam didn't answer him. She put his tea on the table and let it stand. That was her way, and it had never once stopped him. Words came out of Dad like water from the broken pump in March, and by the time he'd finished the kitchen was wet with them and nobody could sit down.

That night I lay in the box bed with my sister's feet against my spine and tried a trick Mrs Pringle had taught me at the Co-op, where she sold thread and said nothing she didn't mean. You imagine what a thing would look like written on you, then you find out if you can still stand up.

So I pictured it: Dad's words in ink across his forearms, in the copperplate the schoolmaster used. Every hard thing he'd said since Easter, lined up beside the ones he'd said the day my brother was born and he cried in the yard where he thought no one could see. I expected to laugh. I didn't. I saw him at the table with his sleeves pushed up and every sentence marching round him like a fence.

In the morning he reached for the loaf with his vest sleeves rolled, and I looked at his bare forearms and found nothing there but freckles and a burn from the lamp. Mam poured the tea and set it down in front of him. "Well," she said, not looking up, "would you still be you?" He looked at his wrist for a long time, the way you check a clock you don't trust. Then he asked her for the salt, and he said please.