Black and grey fine line script reading nothing gold can stay with a small flower sketch, tattooed on the upper back beside the shoulder blade, with hair falling across the skin.

Nothing gold can stay script on upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey photograph of a person's upper back, with long hair falling over the left shoulder. The tattoo is a line of thin, cursive lettering reading nothing gold can stay, with a small sketched flower and leaf at the end of the line. The black ink is crisp against pale skin, and the image has a soft vignette around the edges.

Lettering Fine line Back Script Lettering Quote Flower Leaf

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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

Sit down, you're blocking the lamp, and leave that net alone until I've finished. My hands are too stiff for knots now, but they still know a story when it comes up in the mesh. The autumn the Margaret Ann came home with her name flaking off her transom, the whole harbour stopped talking about the price of cod and started talking about gold.

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Idris Pell had painted that name in spring, every letter laid with real gold leaf, and folk came down the quay just to look at it shine. He was proud of it and said so in the Anchor, more than once. By October the salt had got under the leaf and the letters were lifting like scales. Then one wet morning a sycamore leaf came off the cliff road, blew across the slipway and stuck to the M, and Idris, who had sworn he would never let a scrap of gold go, sat down on a bollard and wept like a child.

Skipper Dunn wouldn't let anyone scrape it. He said a thing that's going to go should be seen going. So every morning for a month he rowed out to her, and every evening the harbour counted what was left. The gold went first from the A, then the n, until only a ghost of the name was left, and the leaf, brown and curled, sat in the gap where the M had been, holding on as if someone had told it to.

The Margaret Ann went out one last time in November and came back empty-netted and grinning. I still have a flake of that gold in my tobacco tin. I take it out on wet days and look at it until it stops being gold and starts being mine.