Black and white photo of two people with matching fine script tattoos reading hakuna matata, one upside down on the upper back and one on the shoulder.

Matching hakuna matata script on two shoulders

Lettering · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

Two people lie close together, showing a matching script tattoo of the phrase hakuna matata on each of their shoulders. The upper example sits on the shoulder blade area and is upside down in the frame, while the lower one sits on the top of the shoulder near the collarbone. The black and grey photograph shows thin, even linework and soft shadows on the skin.

Lettering Fine line Shoulder Back Script text Phrase Matching tattoo Shoulder

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The brass tin of gold leaf had gone green at the lid, and Mabel Crake wouldn't let me open it until the kettle was on. That was how I learned a sign is only as honest as the hand that holds the size. She had painted names on narrowboats along the Kennet for forty years, gilt with a black shadow line, and she could letter a chapel noticeboard as neatly as a coffin plate.

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One wet Tuesday two sisters came down the towpath with a phrase written on the back of a beer mat. Ruth and Dell Harker wanted it on their shoulders, matching, and Dell wanted it lying the right way for both of them when they lay head to head on the bank. Mabel said the eye always reads backwards on a wall, so you paint the mirror first and trust the water to put it right. She lettered it on tracing paper, flipped it, and sent me off to copy it in pencil onto card until my hand stopped shaking.

Hakuna matata, Mabel said, was Swahili for no worries. Ruth laughed and said that was the most Mabel thing she had ever heard, given the state of the lock gates. Dell asked what it would cost to make the words look as if they had always been there, and Mabel told her the trick was to leave a little room for the skin to breathe.

Years later I walked past the lock at Reading and saw the two of them on a sunny bank, lying close, one phrase reading upright and the other turned away like a boat moored nose to tail. The water below held both of them perfectly. Mabel had been dead a decade by then, but I still paint for the water.