Black fine line script reading goodbye sadness and hello jokes across the back of a neck, below the hairline.

Script lettering on the back of the neck

Fine line · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

Two lines of cursive script in black ink sit across the back of a neck, with the upper line reading goodbye sadness and the lower line reading hello jokes. The linework is thin and even, with the letters shaded only by their solid black strokes. The photo is taken from behind with hair falling above the tattoo and a dark top visible below it, and the skin is lit evenly against a pale background.

Fine line Neck Script Word Quote

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 lost property box at Thornbury Junction holds more umbrellas than sense, and most Thursdays I am the one who sorts them. That was how I came to read the slip of paper folded inside a green leather glove, the handwriting slanted and looping as if it had been written on a moving train. It said: 'goodbye sadness, hello jokes.' Nothing else. No name, no ticket stub.

Keep reading

I should have binned it. Instead I pinned it to the corkboard above the kettle, between the timetable for the Hexham line and a heron somebody's child had drawn in felt tip. Dev from the buffet asked whose it was. I said it was nobody's, which was true.

Over the next month the glove stayed unclaimed. Commuters came and went, asking about phone chargers and dog leads, and every time the kettle clicked I looked at the slip and felt a little foolish, like a man laughing at a joke nobody else had heard. The four-fifteen was cancelled for signalling, then the five-forty ran forty minutes late, and somewhere in all that delay I started saying the words under my breath as the doors shut.

On the last Friday of October a woman in a rain-stiff coat came to the counter asking for a glove. She described it exactly, down to the stitched cuff. When I passed it across she didn't take it straight away. She turned it over, read the slip I had tucked inside, and laughed, a short surprised sound, the kind you make when someone says the thing you were too polite to say. Then she tucked the glove under her arm and walked off towards platform four, and I watched her go until the barrier swallowed her.