Black fine line script lettering running down the middle of a woman's back, shown from behind with a long blonde braid over one shoulder.

Script lettering down the spine

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman is photographed from behind with a long blonde braid draped over one shoulder and a bare back. A vertical line of black cursive script runs down the centre of her spine, with the lettering spaced evenly and set against pale skin and a white carved screen. The image is in black and grey tones with soft natural light and a close, centred composition.

Lettering Fine line Back Script Lettering Spine Braid Woman

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

The brief from the Chancery was short: one line of verse, cut in a single column down the east face of the screen, letters no wider than a thumb and spaced by plumb line rather than by eye. Ysolde Marrow had copied a hundred such lines in thirty years at the Aldermere scriptorium, but never one that the queen would pass every morning on her way down to the river stair. She chalked the guide marks, dipped her pen in the blue-black ink the monks of Saint Orla still ground by hand, and began at the top with a looping capital that leaned toward the carved lilies.

Keep reading

The verse was an old one about ships coming home before the tide turns, and she worked through the morning with the lamplighter, Tobin Ferrow, holding the ladder and complaining about the draught through the pierced stone. By noon the line had reached the height of her shoulder. She stepped back to check the spacing and saw that the lattice was thin enough at that point for light to pass through, so that the letters showed on the inner wall of the chamber as shadows, reversed and sharp as frost.

Read from the queen's side, the verse was no longer about ships. Ysolde had made her strokes without thinking, but the reversed shadows spelled out a plain instruction: come back before the tide turns. She stood a long while holding her pen, then wiped the last letter clean with a damp cloth and began again, one stroke at a time, so that from either side of the stone the words would say the same thing: come home.