Black and grey lettering tattoo on a person's upper back, reading Words, are our most inexhaustible source of magic, set in a serif typeface below the shoulder blade.

Quote tattoo on the upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a person's upper back, showing a line of black serif text on the skin beside the shoulder blade. The quote is set in two centred lines, with clean, even lettering and soft grey shading in the ink. The image is black and white, with a bra strap visible across the shoulder and a plain light background.

Lettering Back Quote Word Text Serif

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The officer at the crossing turns the dictionary over twice before he opens it, as though its weight might tell him something. You keep your hands flat on the counter in the yellow light of the booth. That morning your aunt had sewn it into the lining of your coat, its spine wrapped in a tea towel printed with lemons, and told you a book is only a suitcase for people who have nowhere else to keep their memories.

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"Personal effects," you say. "Nothing to declare."

He thumbs through pages gone soft at the corners. Every margin is crowded with her pencil: a word for the smell of rain on a hot road, a word for a promise someone means but cannot keep, a word for the moment a train pulls away with your name still in its mouth. He stops near the back, where she has underlined a line in red ink, and reads it aloud in a careful voice. "Words, are our most inexhaustible source of magic." Nothing on his form asks about that, but he holds the page a moment longer than he needs to.

Then he closes the book and slides it back across the counter with two fingers. "The lemons are nice," he says, and stamps your passport without looking at it. You walk out past the barrier with the dictionary against your ribs and the cold coming off the river, and you understand that the only thing you carried across was the one thing he had no way to search for.

Under the first streetlamp on the other side, you open the book to the red line and find, in your aunt's looping hand beneath it, a word you do not yet know. You say it aloud anyway, and it goes out into the dark like something set loose.