Black script lettering reading 'One day at a time' across the upper back, a lettering tattoo between the shoulder blades.

One day at a time script on upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows the upper back of a person with dark hair pulled over one shoulder, wearing a cream lace top with a scalloped neckline. The tattoo is the phrase 'One day at a time' in a flowing black script, with fine, even linework and no shading. It sits centrally across the upper back, with the soft focus and warm lighting of an indoor setting around it.

Lettering Back Quote Text Script

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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

The brown suitcase came back to the lost property office on a wet Tuesday, three weeks after the 6.14 to Carlisle had carried it off without its owner. Alan had the flu, so I was the one who unzipped it on the counter, expecting dirty socks and a bottle of gin. Instead there was a folded sheet of old timetable paper, and on it, in pencil gone silver from handling, one line written again and again in the same looping hand: One day at a time.

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I read it twice and thought of the platform clock at Thornbury, which has run four minutes fast since the nineties and which nobody has ever bothered to correct. I know something about waiting. I have stood behind the same counter for eleven years, stamping forms for people who never look up, and every morning before the first train I tell myself the same small thing, that a day only has to be got through in pieces the size of a platform.

I wrote to the address on the luggage label. Nothing came back for a month. Then a postcard arrived, a picture of Carlisle cathedral with the stamp put on upside down. It said, Keep the case. I was going to the hospital and I had stopped counting the days. The paper is yours if you want it.

I didn't want it. I pinned it above the ticket rack, next to the clock. Each morning I check my watch against the station clock, and each morning I set my watch by its mistake.