Colour tattoo of the island of Jamaica filled with green, black and gold bands, with the word irie in black script, on a person's lower back.

Jamaica outline with irie script on lower back

Lettering · Back · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows an outline of the island of Jamaica filled with green, black and gold-yellow bands, with red speckling in the gold area. The word irie is written across the middle in bold black script with a clean, solid outline. The island fills the centre of the frame against smooth skin, with a grey garment visible along the bottom edge.

Lettering Back Map Island Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Desmond had painted shop fascias along the Falmouth waterfront for thirty years, and he knew a word on glass had to be read from across the road by someone walking fast. So when Miss Pauline came in with a sketch of the island drawn on the back of a bus ticket, he asked her what the word was for.

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"Irie," she said. "It means everything sound. Nothing to worry over."

He traced the coast first with a carpenter's pencil, then laid in the bands the way his father had taught him for the parade floats: green along the north, black in the west, gold filling the middle where the mountains would be. She wanted red speckled through the gold like sparks off a cookfire, so he dabbed it on with a stiff brush and swore softly when one drop ran.

The script was the hard part. He wrote it three times on scrap paper before he trusted his hand, looping the i and the e down into the curve of the island so the word seemed to sit on the land rather than across it. Pauline watched him draw the black outline with a fine brush, and she did not speak until he set it down.

"Everything sound," she read, and tapped the window where she meant it to hang. Desmond wiped the paint from his thumb with a rag. Outside, gulls were quarrelling over a fish head on the quay, and the sea lay flat and blue in the way that made people forget to be afraid of anything.