Black and grey serif lettering reading I am the architect of my own Destruction, with a small flourish beneath, across a person's upper back.

Quote tattoo across upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey photograph of a person's upper back, seen from behind, with blonde hair pulled up at the top of the frame. The tattoo is two lines of serif lettering, with the first line in italic, reading I am the architect of my own Destruction, and a small scrolled flourish sits below it. The solid black ink is crisp and evenly applied against the greyscale skin, and the text is centred in the composition.

Lettering Back Quote Text Flourish

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have been asked to read at your niece's wedding, which is how you come to be standing beside a trestle table in a Suffolk village hall, holding a printed card that says Sonnet 116 in the wrong font. The caterers are stacking chairs behind you with a noise like dropped cutlery. Your sister keeps touching her lapel as if checking it is still there.

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The card was typed by someone who clearly thought the poem was about a lighthouse. You meant to correct it before the day. Instead, flipping it over, you find the notes you pencilled on the back twenty years ago, when you drew car parks and bus shelters for a practice in Ipswich. Load first, then the pitch. Never trust a roof you haven't walked on. Beneath that, in smaller capitals, the line you copied from a book about Wren because you liked how it sounded: I am the architect of my own Destruction.

You reach the fourth line of the sonnet and stop. Someone at the back says, go on, love, and you can't tell whether they mean the poem or the speech, so you tell them instead about the cantilevered ramp you once signed off, the one that sent a tabby cat clean over the railings and into the Orwell. Nobody laughs at the cat. The bride laughs at everything else, and her new husband wipes his eyes with a napkin printed with swallows.

Afterwards your sister finds you by the bins, tearing the card into neat strips. You could have just read the poem, she says. I did, you tell her. It was the back that needed reading.