Black script lettering reading Your word is a lamp for my feet, a light on my path, with Psalm 119:105 below, tattooed across the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Psalm 119:105 lettering on upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo is a two-line quotation from Psalm 119:105 with the reference set beneath it in a block typeface. The lettering uses fine black linework with a flowing script for the verse and a sturdier serif style for the reference, with soft grey shading in places. The photo is a close, slightly angled shot of the upper back and shoulder, with the lettering filling the centre of the frame.

Lettering Back Bible verse Psalm Scripture Path Text

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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 nearer, the fire is only good for the front of a man. You want the crossing at Harrow Bridge, do you? Everyone who has walked that road has a version of the night the lamp went out, and mine is the only one where the walker keeps walking.

Keep reading

Ezra Quill kept the toll hut on the far bank in the years when the frontier was still posts and wire strung between them. He had a lantern with a cracked chimney and a small black Bible his mother had pressed into his hands, and the two of them argued every evening over which was the more use. The lantern, he said, showed you the next step. The book showed you the step after that, which is harder to see and harder to forget.

The night of the heavy snow, a woman came up the track with a child asleep inside her coat and no papers at all, only a scrap of brown paper with a verse copied on it in pencil. Her sister had written it, she said, and told her it was the thing to carry. Ezra held the lantern over the paper and read it aloud, slowly, the way the guards never troubled to read anything: Your word is a lamp for my feet, a light on my path. Then the wind took the flame, and he found he could still say the words in the dark, so he took her hand and counted the posts aloud until the ground changed under their boots.

In the morning the lantern sat on the far bank, its glass unbroken and its wick cold. Ezra never got his own papers sorted, but the next winter he hung the lantern on a nail by the gate where anyone could see it, with the pencilled scrap tucked behind the cracked glass. People coming up the track after dark could read it by whatever light they had, and most of them, he liked to say, found they did not need the lantern at all.