Fine line script lettering reading love me for who I am, running vertically down the centre of a bare back.

Script lettering down the spine

Fine line · Back · Colour · Photo

A bare upper back with a thin, vertical line of cursive script tattoo running down the spine, in a dark purple-blue ink. The lettering reads love me for who I am, with even, delicate linework and no shading. The photograph is taken from behind with the head out of frame and long blonde hair falling over one shoulder, with light-wash jeans worn at the waist.

Fine line Lettering Back Script Word Phrase

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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

The lamp in the Halden Reach archive hums at a pitch you have stopped hearing, and the cursive on the cold-storage card is the only thing in the room that seems to want reading. Someone wrote it by hand in a blue ink that has outlasted two wars and a hull breach. You have spent eleven months sorting ration slips and wedding lists from the Ostrava cache, and this is the first thing that has made you put your pen down.

Keep reading

The card came out of a sealed locker marked personal effects. Inside was a folded note, a bus token from a city now under the ice shelf, and a single line running down the card's edge in letters that lean like they are walking into wind: love me for who I am. Nobody in the registry knows who wrote it. The registrar wants a catalogue number. You want to know whether the hand that wrote it was steady or shaking.

You test the line against the ledgers. Three hundred and nine personnel files, and none ends in a name that matches the loop of that final m. Then, on the seventh night, you find a shipping manifest where a woman signed for a crate of ink and a dozen needles, bound for a parlour on the lower decks. Ink, you think, that refuses to fade. The phrase on the card is spelled the old way, and so is the word on the manifest.

You copy the line onto your own wrist with a biro, which the registrar would not approve of, and sit with it until the lamp dims for the night cycle. Tomorrow you will file the card under unknown. Tonight you let the words stay where they are, running straight and certain down your arm, asking nothing of anyone who reads them.