Upper back tattoo of the words CLEARLY I HAVE MADE SOME BAD DECISIONS in red and black block lettering with shaded letterforms.

Quote lettering across upper back

Lettering · Back · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo spells out four lines of capitalised block lettering across the upper back, reading CLEARLY, I HAVE MADE, SOME BAD and DECISIONS. Each letter has a bold black outline with red and dark shading and a three-dimensional drop shadow. The photograph is taken from behind on a plain background, with the subject's head and face out of frame and the lettering filling most of the composition.

Lettering Back Quote Word Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last letter needed a second coat, and Mags Pell had been up the ladder since eight, shading the drop shadow in a red that refused to go darker. Below her, Neville from the council stood with a flask and a clipboard, reading the words she had painted across the gatehouse of Caldervale Keep: CLEARLY, I HAVE MADE, SOME BAD, DECISIONS. He had ordered them for the new café, and he had been very firm about the order.

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"It's a joke," he said. "Tourists like a joke. Heritage people will hate it, which is the point." Mags said nothing. The ladder was tall, the paint was slow, and a man who ordered lettering from a photograph of a stencil he had found on a forum deserved whatever he got. Behind her the keep had been falling down politely since the Civil War, its battlements gone to jackdaws and nettles.

One of the jackdaws landed on the top of the S just as she finished the shadow. It looked down at the wet paint with its head on one side, then stepped off the stone and left a single neat print in the red, right where the highlight was meant to go.

Neville wanted it scrubbed. Mags told him the bird had signed it, and that the bird had better taste than the client. He paid her in full anyway, and the sign is still up. Visitors photograph it from the car park, and nobody has yet asked who made the decisions.