Black and grey tattoo of the words Normal People Scare Me in block capitals across the upper back, just below the neck, on a person with hair tied up.

Normal people scare me quote on upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph taken from behind shows a person with hair tied up and a dark top. The tattoo reads NORMAL PEOPLE SCARE ME in three lines of uneven, hand-drawn block capitals in solid black ink. The text sits centrally on the upper back, below the nape of the neck, with plenty of soft background around it.

Lettering Back Quote Text Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dennis Mallory had lettered shopfronts along Ferry Road for thirty-one years, and in all that time nobody had asked him to make the letters look worse. The girl wanted them crooked. She stood in his workshop with a sketch on the back of a bus receipt, three lines in soft pencil, the M leaning like a man walking into wind.

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"Normal people scare me," she said, tapping the paper. "Not in a bad way. I want it on the board outside the chapel, under the notices about the jumble sale. Make it look like somebody did it in a hurry."

"Somebody did," Dennis said. "Me, in 1987, with the wrong brush." He mixed black enamel on a palette knife and thought about his late wife, who used to say the honest letters were the ones that didn't quite finish their sentences. He had never told anyone that, and he didn't tell the girl either.

He painted it over two evenings. Each line sat a little lower than the one before, and the O in PEOPLE got squashed flat as a coin. On the second night she came back alone, read it under the streetlamp, and laughed so hard she had to sit down on the chapel step. When she left, he found the bus receipt in his apron pocket. Beside her pencil sketch she had written a note: the E in PEOPLE should be straight. He looked at the sign for a long time, then left it exactly as it was.