Black script lettering tattoo running across the outer thigh, photographed in a bedroom with a red garment over the hip.

Script lettering across a thigh

Lettering · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a line of cursive lettering tattooed across the thigh, with the words set upside down relative to the camera so they are hard to read. The linework is smooth and fairly fine, filled in dark ink with no visible shading. The skin is shown in the lower half of the frame, partly covered by red fabric, with a window, wooden railing and a mirror in the background.

Lettering Thigh Text Script Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Osric had a habit of writing his letters upside down, so that the reader across the table had to turn his head to make them out. Sit yourself down by the fire, friend, and I will tell you how that came to be, for the lamp is poor and my throat is older than my hands.

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The scriptorium at Hallowmere had one long oak table and forty years of ink soaked into its grain. Osric copied psalters there for the prior, who could not abide a fine hand he had to squint at. So Osric learned to form his capitals the other way up, each tail hanging down toward the edge of the page, and the prior would sit on the far side with his hood pushed back and read them the right way round for himself.

In the spring the prior's eyes began to go, and he stopped coming to the table. Osric kept writing anyway, one line each morning, turned upside down and carried across the cloister on a slate. The prior sent slips back with single words on them. Ink. Rain. Enough. Osric never knew which were jokes and which were pleas, and he has told me he never wanted to know.

The last slip came in the autumn. It said only read it again, in a hand gone thin and wandering. Osric turned the psalter over, looked at the line he had written that morning, and understood at last that the prior had never needed the words to be right way up. He had only been waiting for them to come round the table to him.