Black and white photo of a woman's upper back showing a small fine line script tattoo reading live forever at the base of the neck.

Live forever script on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with a long braid seen from behind, with a small black script tattoo reading live forever sitting between the shoulder blades just below the nape. The thin, cursive lettering is rendered in solid black ink with clean, even strokes. The black and white photograph uses a dark background and soft side light, with the white straps of a top crossing the back and drawing attention to the tattoo.

Fine line Lettering Back Script

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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

Dessa had the lettering half finished when the lock keeper came down the towpath with his hands pushed into his coat, asking whether the boat was for sale. She didn't look up. The brush was loaded with black enamel, and the words ran thin and slanting along the cabin side, the way her uncle Cy had taught her to hold a line: light on the upstroke, heavy on the turn, never hurrying the tail of a letter.

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Cy had painted roses and castles on half the boats between Braunston and Hillmorton, but he rarely wrote words, and never wrote anything he didn't mean. The winter before he died he had sat in the cabin with a flask of tea and sketched the phrase on the back of a tide table, then handed it to her and said, "Put that on Patience when I'm gone. It's not a promise, duck. It's an instruction to the paint." She had thought him sentimental. She thought him less so now, with the wet black letters drying in the cold light off the water.

By noon the lock keeper had given up and gone back to his gates, and a pair of ducklings were picking along the edge of the lock cut as if they owned it. Dessa stood back to judge the spacing, then took the finest liner brush from its tin and drew a small, plain line beneath the words, the way Cy had always done, a tiny mark that meant the work was signed by someone who had stayed to finish it.

She wiped her hands on a rag, climbed down to the towpath, and waited for the paint to set before she let the boat go.