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

Quote tattoo across upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of a woman's upper back, with her hair pulled over one shoulder and the straps of a dress visible. The tattoo is a serif lettering quote, I am the architect of my own Destruction, with a thin decorative flourish underneath. The solid black ink sits centrally on the skin against a plain pale wall.

Lettering Back Quote Word Text Flourish

Find an artist for this

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 drawing office in Greenock smelled of linseed and wet wool, and you had spent eleven months on the lines of the Marrowby, a three-masted barque bound for Valparaiso with coal in her hold and forty-one souls on her books. Mr Halloran tapped your sheet with his pipe stem and said the stern was too fine, that she would sit down by the head in a following sea. You said nothing. You had already shaved the keel by a sixteenth because the owners wanted her quicker, and you had signed the title block in the same looping hand you used for birthday cards.

Keep reading

Four weeks out, the glass fell like a stone down a well. You stood the middle watch beside the carpenter, listening to her timbers complain like a cupboard door in a draught, and you knew, the way a clerk knows a column is wrong before he adds the total, that the fault ran back to your pencil. The coal shifted at two bells. By first light she lay over at an angle no sane man would have drawn, and the captain was calling for the longboat in a voice you had never heard him use.

You put the cook's boy and the widow Pryce's two girls over the side first, then went below for the ship's papers, because your calculations were folded inside them and some clerk in Valparaiso would want proof of what had been promised. The water came up through the companionway while you knelt at the chart table. You remember the sheet of lines sliding past your knee, the flourish beneath the title catching the lamplight, and then only the cold.

They pulled you from a spar two days later off the Chilean coast. Mr Halloran pinned your drawing to the wall of the office after that, at the corner of his desk where every apprentice would see it. He would tap the small black curl of ink beneath your name with his pipe and say nothing at all, which was worse than anything he could have said.