Black and grey script lettering reading Mangubat with long swirling flourishes, tattooed across the upper back between the shoulder blades.

Script lettering across upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey photograph of the upper back, showing the word Mangubat in flowing script with looped flourishes extending above and below the letters. The linework is bold and smooth, with soft grey shading giving the lettering some depth. The tattoo sits centrally on the frame, with the neck and out-of-focus background visible around it.

Lettering Back Script word Flourishes Calligraphy Word

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

Dear Lorraine,

Keep reading

I have read your message four times and still can't believe you kept the register. Thirty-one years, and you remember the seating plan for the leavers' dinner better than I remember my own mother's birthday. Yes, I'll come on Saturday. I'll come because of the blackboard, if I'm honest.

Do you remember Miss Mangubat in Room Six, the way she wrote the date every morning without looking at the chalk? She did her capitals with a loop that swung out past the edge of the board and came back again, as if she were sending the word off on a walk and calling it home. None of us could copy it. Sean tried with a bottle of correction fluid and spent the afternoon outside the head's office for it.

When I cleared Dad's desk after the funeral in March, I found a card folded in his wallet, soft as cloth, with her name written on the back in that same hand. Not a birthday, not a note. Just the word, and a curl of flourish beneath it, as if he'd practised it for years and never told a soul. It's propped against the teapot as I write this.

So, Saturday. Bring the register. I want to know whether the school still keeps her old ink pot in the cupboard under the stairs, and whether anyone left alive can still make the tail of the g swing back round the way she did.

Love, Angela