Black and grey fine line lettering on a person's upper back reads hand wash warm water, mild soap like dry, do not machine dry, do not iron, with four laundry care symbols below.

Laundry care label text on upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of a person's upper back showing a tattoo of four lines of capitalised sans-serif lettering with four laundry care symbols beneath, matching the wording on a clothing care label. The linework is thin and even, and the ink is solid black with no shading, set centrally across the shoulder blades. A small dark botanical mark sits near the right shoulder at the edge of the frame.

Lettering Fine line Back Text 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

Sit down, the lot of you, and mind the cat. Every word the old ones left us came with instructions, the same as a shirt does, and the first of them was the one about the water. Hand wash, warm water, mild soap. Nobody in Fenmouth could read it any more except Eudora Vane, who kept the salvage shed where the drowned mall used to stand, and she read it aloud to my mother the winter the bridge went under.

Keep reading

There was a boy called Tobias Crane who had a coat his father left him, grey wool gone thin at the elbows. Sewn inside the collar was a label that said do not machine dry, and beside it a crossed-out iron and a square for drying flat. Nobody in the town had run a machine in forty years, but Tobias took those words as a point of honour. He washed the coat in a tin bath with a sliver of soap he had traded for a pair of boots, warm water from the kettle, gentle as a priest with a newborn.

He hung it on a line strung between the two chimneys of the brewery, and then he did the hardest thing, which was nothing. He sat on the roof for three days watching it. Rain came and went. The wind tugged at the sleeves like a child asking to be let down. On the third morning the coat was dry and stiff and smelled of smoke and cold, and he pulled it on, and the label scratched his neck the way it always had, and he laughed until the gulls went up off the roof.