$Black lettering tattoo of the word mind above a line and matter below it, set out like a fraction on the upper back below the neck.$

Mind over matter lettering on upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows the upper back and nape of a person with dark hair tied up and a silver chain around the neck. The tattoo is two words, mind and matter, in a plain typed-style font with a thin horizontal rule between them, so the layout reads like a fraction. The ink is solid black on a warm skin tone, and the composition is centred on the spine with the grey top framing the lower edge.

Lettering Back Word Text Line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Our father never wrote down a sum he could not do in his head, which is why the solicitor in Hessle had to send for the old adding machine when he read the will. Stan had left the timber yard to his sons, Ray and Col, both past forty and not speaking since the fire in the drying shed in 1998. Ray wanted the sawmill. Col wanted the land behind it. Mr Pell, a thin man with a fountain pen he never capped, pushed a pad across the desk and asked them to divide the estate fairly.

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Col drew a line down the middle of the pad. Ray drew another, slightly to the left, and they argued about the lines for most of an hour until Mr Pell lifted the pencil from Col's hand. Above a short rule he wrote mind. Below it he wrote matter. It is a fraction, he said. Your father liked fractions. Whatever a thing is worth, divided by what it weighs to you.

The brothers looked at it for a long time. Ray saw that the top half was the sawmill, the thing he had spent his life standing inside. Col saw that the bottom half was the ground, which had never once been what their father cared about. Neither of them had thought of the rule as anything but a boundary. It was the only piece of paper they had ever agreed on, and it seemed to hold them both up.

They signed on the Tuesday. Ray kept the mill and Col took the acres. On the Friday Col came back with a stencil and a tin of black paint and lettered the old yard gate with the same two words and the same thin bar between them, so that every lorry driver rolling through Stan's gate would have to read the sum and wonder who had got the better of the deal.