Back view of a woman with a fine line script tattoo running down her spine and a shaded black and grey rose on her upper arm.

Script down the spine with a rose on the arm

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman is photographed from behind with her hair up and her back bare. A vertical line of small, fine black script runs from the nape of the neck down the length of the spine, with a tiny mark near the top of the neck. A shaded black and grey rose sits on her upper arm, and the photograph is softly lit with a neutral indoor background.

Fine line Botanical Back Upper arm Neck Script Spine Rose Lettering

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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

Nell had been gluing spines since the gas went off in the workshop at Hunslet, and by eleven the paste had gone cold in its pot. She worked by a single lamp over the sewing frame, stitching the signatures of an old surveyor's field notes, when the knock came at the loading door. It was Mr Abernethy's boy, soaked to the knees, holding a parcel tied with string that smelled of river water.

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Inside was a ledger with warped boards and a spine cracked open like a split plank. Every page had been written by a man who measured the Aire for the council forty years back, and down the spine, in the faded gold of his own hand, he had lettered the names of the locks in order, from Leeds towards the sea. Nell ran her thumb along them. Nine names, then a tenth that someone had scraped away with a knife.

Pressed between the last two signatures was a rose, flattened to the thinness of tissue, its petals gone the colour of weak tea. Abernethy had left a note: "Rebind it so the spine can be read standing up. The rose was my wife's. Find the tenth name and you'll know why the gate held." Nell laughed at the cheek of it, then stopped laughing, because the tenth name was nowhere in the book.

She worked until the bells of St Peter's struck three, sewing new linen tapes and copying the locks back in ink as the old gold flaked under her brush. When she finished she stood the ledger upright on the bench, the lettering running down its back like a column of water, and wrote the tenth name herself: Hope. It was not on any map. It was the name of the gate that had let the water through, and she had decided, somewhere near dawn, that it would stay.