Close photo of a black script tattoo reading "i adore you" with a small heart in place of the d, on the lower back.

Script "i adore you" on lower back

Lettering · Back · Mixed · Photo

A close photograph of a script tattoo across the lower back that reads "i adore you", with a small heart in place of the letter d. The linework is fairly thin and even, in black ink, with a touch of red filling the heart. The subject is cropped below the shoulders and above the thighs, with a grey skirt and dark cardigan around the tattoo and a carpeted floor below.

Lettering Back Script Heart Phrase 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

You have set the vermilion pot beside your inkwell again, and Brother Osric has pretended not to see it for three days running. The abbot wants the psalter finished before the feast of Saint Etheldreda. You have eleven leaves left and a head full of a word you have no business writing.

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Each evening, by the light of a tallow stub, you copy the same plain line in your smallest hand, and each morning, before Prime, you find the wrong letter standing where the right one should be. Your wrist knew the shape before your mind did. The d in the margin of the Lenten psalm has grown a heart, the red dropped in like a bead of blood before you could blot it. You scrape at it with the pumice and only smear it wider.

When the abbot comes to inspect the leaves, he holds the page up to the window and reads slowly, his lips moving. "What letter is this?" he asks. You tell him it belongs to an older alphabet, one the scriptorium forgot. He is quiet for a long while, then he laughs, low and surprised, the way you have never heard him laugh in chapel.

"Some letters are not in the grammar books," he says, and gives the leaf back. "Leave it. I will answer to the chapter." You sit down at the desk with your hands still unsteady, and you do not scrape the heart away. Instead you begin the next line, and for once your letters come out straight.