Black lettering tattoo on a person's upper back reading 'It takes courage to grow up and become who you truly are', with scrolled flourishes above and below and an attribution to e.e. cummings.

Quote lettering across upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo is a quotation set in bold capitals and smaller lowercase serif-style lettering, centred on the upper back. Decorative scrolled flourishes sit above and below the text, framing the lines. The work is in solid black ink with a clean, even finish against warm skin, and the composition is shot straight on with the text filling the middle of the frame.

Lettering Back Quote Lettering Flourish Scrollwork 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

The galley on the Portsmouth ferry is six feet of steel and one stubborn stove, and the cook who runs it has rules about where you stand. The urn goes on at five. Bacon never leaves the pan unattended. Nobody speaks to Mrs Okonedo while she is portioning beans. You learn these in your first week because she tells you, and then she watches to see whether you remember.

Keep reading

The letter from the catering college in Leeds has been folded into your apron pocket for three weeks. It offers you a place, a September start, and a signature that looks like someone was in a hurry. Every shift you touch it the way you'd pat a pocket for keys, and every shift the corners soften a little more with fryer grease and steam.

On the crossing in a November swell, while you're scraping the griddle and the plates chatter on the rack, she holds out her hand. You pretend not to understand. She takes the letter from your pocket anyway, reads it standing with her glasses halfway down her nose, and hands it back without comment. "You're waiting for someone to say you're allowed," she says. "Nobody is coming down those stairs with a permission slip, love."

She tears a docket off the printer roll, the thermal paper still warm, and writes across the top in block capitals: GO. She slides it under the magnet on the fridge door, beside the tide timetable. When you come back from the mess room at the end of the shift, it is still there, the ink smudged where she pressed too hard. Underneath, smaller, she has written: pack the knives first.