Black fine line script tattoo reading fearfully and wonderfully made, Psalms 139:14, across the upper back near the shoulder.

Psalm 139:14 script on upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A handwritten style script tattoo reads fearfully and wonderfully made, followed by Psalms 139:14, running diagonally across the upper back. The lettering is in black ink with thin, even linework and light shading. Strong sunlight from a window casts shadows across the skin, and the photograph is taken at a close angle.

Lettering Fine line Back Script Lettering Bible verse Psalm Quote

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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 mate of the Marigold kept his Bible in tarred oilskin, and when the wind dropped off the Horn he would take it out and read the same page aloud to the deck. Nobody asked him why. Old Cass said it was the psalm about being knit together in the dark, and that a man could hear it better with the sea hissing under him.

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Ruth came aboard at Valparaiso, a girl of eleven who had hidden in a water cask. She was sick for nine days and would not speak. On the tenth she asked the mate what the words meant. He told her they meant she had been made with care, fearfully and wonderfully, by a maker who did not rush the work. She said that sounded like what a carpenter would say about a good boat. He laughed so hard he had to sit down on the pump.

She copied the verse onto the back of a spoiled chart with a burnt stick, letter by letter, her tongue between her teeth. The letters leaned against each other like men on a lee rail. When the mate found the chart it was spotted with tar, and the line ran off the edge, so she wrote Psalm 139 and the verse number underneath, small, as if the numbers could hold the rest up.

At Falmouth the Marigold was broken up and the chart went into a drawer at the Custom House. Ruth went ashore with a canvas bag and a new name. Years later a sailmaker's widow in Penryn found it among her husband's papers. The lettering ran off the edge, but the numbers at the foot stood square and careful. She could not read the hand that wrote them, only that someone had taken pains over every stroke, and she pinned it above the loft door where the afternoon light fell across it.