Black and grey lettering tattoo reading 'Destroy what destroys you' across the nape of a person's neck, photographed from behind with dark hair falling over the shoulders.

Quote lettering across the nape of the neck

Lettering · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A black-and-grey photograph taken from behind shows a single line of uppercase lettering reading 'DESTROY WHAT DESTROYS YOU' across the nape of the neck. The letters are set in a clean, slightly irregular typeface with solid black ink and fine edges. The background is pale and softly lit, and dark hair is pulled to one side, leaving the tattoo as the clear focus.

Lettering Neck Quote Text Phrase

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow came over Cold Fell on the Tuesday, and by dark the road down to Alston had vanished under it. I had three rooms let that week and one of them went to a man who kept stamping the slush off his boots long after he was indoors. His name was Abel Crane. He carried a wooden case of lead type about the size of a child's coffin, and he set it down by my kitchen fire as though it might bite.

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He was a printer bound for a chapel fête in a town I have since forgotten. On the second night the wind wouldn't let anyone sleep, so he sat at my table with a composing stick and a lamp, picking letters from their boxes one by one. I asked what he was spelling. He turned the stick so I could read it, a backwards row of capitals that looked like a curse until you set it the right way round: DESTROY WHAT DESTROYS YOU. A foundry owner in Sheffield had given him the line, he said, the week after a fire took the man's whole shop and most of his sense with it.

I thought at once of my late husband's ledger, the one he kept in the cellar with every slight and unpaid tab from forty years of village talk, which I had gone on adding to out of spite long after he was buried. I did not say so. I only watched Abel ink a proof, lay it on the table to dry, and fold it into his coat without looking at me.

In the morning I fetched the ledger up from the cellar, tore out the first page, and fed it to the grate. The flames took the names one at a time. By Thursday the plough had cut the road open, and the snow on the hill had gone to grey slush, and I found Abel's proof still folded in the corner of the settle where he had left it, the letters clean and the right way round.