Black lettering tattoo reading La Bella Vita in cursive script across the upper chest.

La Bella Vita script on chest

Lettering · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo reads La Bella Vita in a flowing cursive script with a mix of thick and thin strokes. It is rendered in solid black ink with clean, even linework and slight shading. It sits horizontally across the upper chest against smooth skin, with a purple lace garment and a white tissue visible at the edges of the frame.

Lettering Chest Phrase Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nan Rosa came over from Salerno in 1961 with one suitcase and a jar of her mother's tomato sauce wrapped in a jumper. Kestrel House had nine lifts that worked on a good day, eleven floors, and a view of nothing but the car park, and she still called it the best address she'd ever had. Whenever the lift shuddered or the boiler knocked, she'd lift her chin at the ceiling and say it, quietly, like a prayer she didn't need to finish: la bella vita.

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Every Sunday I sat with her on the balcony while she taught me to write it. She made me use the back of the gas bills because paper was for letters that mattered. Thick on the downstroke, thin on the turn, she said, the way a proper hand moves. My B came out like a pair of lazy dumplings. She laughed until she coughed, then made me do it again until the loops stood up straight.

When the council sent the demolition notice, she read it at the kitchen table, folded it into quarters and put it under the fruit bowl. The lift stopped between the seventh and eighth floors the week after, with her inside and me on the stairs shouting up the shaft. She sang the whole twenty minutes. The engineer said nobody had ever been so calm in there.

The block came down in March. The night before, I walked up all eleven flights and stood on the empty balcony, and I wrote the phrase on the glass with a bar of green soap from her bathroom, thick then thin, the way she'd shown me. By morning the wind had taken the suds, but I like to think the sun read it first.