Black hand-drawn lettering tattooed across a person's back, reading a song lyric over several lines, shown in a lettering style.

Lyric lettering across a back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a person's bare back, filled with black lettering in several lines of uneven, hand-drawn capitals. The text is a lyric that reads down the centre and across the shoulder blades, with the line spacing varying slightly. The image is mostly neutral skin tones with no colour ink, and the subject's head is cropped out of frame.

Lettering Back Lyric Handwritten text Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Alf Tennant had carried other people's weight for thirty-one years, and he knew the particular sag of a case that was heavier than its owner admitted. The Thursday milk train was late again, and the lad on the bench had a cardboard suitcase tied with baler twine, a coat too thin for the fells, and a habit of glancing at the waiting room door as if it might open by itself.

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"Where to, son?"

"Leeds. Then the boat train."

Alf hefted the case onto his shoulder before the boy could argue. The stationmaster's rule was that porters did not let anyone struggle on the up platform, and Alf had never been good at following rules he could see the sense of only halfway. The twine bit through his shirt. Under the brown paper something shifted and gave a small, polite chime.

"What's in it?"

"My mother's clock. She said I'd want it over there. I told her I didn't want anything of hers."

Alf said nothing for the length of the platform. He talked instead, about his own wife's Sunday dinners and how she'd burnt the gravy every week for nineteen years and he'd eaten every drop. Talking, he'd found, took the edge off a load. By the time they reached the carriage door the boy had stopped looking at the waiting room. He set the case down with a grunt, and reached for his wallet, and then didn't open it.

Alf took the stub of carpenter's chalk from his waistcoat and drew one small tick on the lid, the way he marked every stone he lifted off a platform. The boy looked at it, then at him, and went up the steps with his arms empty and the clock ticking quietly in its wrapping on the rack above him.