Script lettering and feathered headdress on back

Lettering · Back · Mixed · Photo

Bold black script reads The heart of an Indian, with fine swirling flourishes beneath the letters. To the right is a profile portrait of a figure wearing a feathered headdress, shaded in grey with red on the feather tips. The tattoo sits on pale skin and is framed by a patterned bikini top at the top of the frame.

Lettering Back Script Lettering Headdress Feather Portrait Profile Swirl Heart

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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

Dolores Quinn had been lettering shopfronts in Hull for thirty-one years, and she could tell a hand-painted stroke from a stencil with her eyes shut. So when Tommy Ashby brought her a scrap of paper with a phrase he wanted in gold over his bakery door, she read it twice before she reached for a pencil. His late father had said it at the bench every morning, he explained: the heart of a man who keeps his word. Tommy had the wording wrong. She drew a neat tick beside the line, then crossed out the second half and wrote it properly.

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She built the letters the old way, starting with a fine pencil guide and working with a goose quill she cut herself, the spare feathers kept in a jam jar on the shelf. Every capital needed a flourish, a loop that tailed off into a swirl, and Tommy watched each one with his arms folded. When the quill ran dry he asked why she bothered with the curls. Nobody could read them faster, she said. They were there so the eye had somewhere to rest between the words.

On the last afternoon the sun came low across Ferens Road and the gold leaf caught it. Tommy stood in the doorway a long time without speaking. Then he took out his wallet, found a crumpled note, and asked if she could add his father's initials underneath, small, in the corner where nobody would look unless they were looking for him.

She did. It took four minutes and cost him nothing extra, which was the only way she knew to say what she thought of it.