Back view of a person with curly brown hair showing a small black fine line script lettering tattoo on the upper back, with the wording partly faint.

Script lettering phrase on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A bare back with dark, curly hair falling over one shoulder, photographed against a pale wall. A small black script phrase sits on the upper back near the shoulder blade, with the first word faint and the rest only partly legible. The ink is thin and crisp, and the soft warm lighting gives the image an even, muted tone.

Fine line Lettering Back Script Quote Lettering

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

Ada Pryce had been lettering shopfronts in Whitby for thirty-one years, and she could tell from the first stroke of a name whether the man who ordered it would pay. So when the new milliner on Church Street came in with a scrap of paper, folded twice, and asked for the words in copperplate on her window, Ada took the paper without looking at the price and unfolded it on the counter.

Keep reading

The hand was shaky and the ink smudged where a thumb had rested. Live your life a masterpiece, it said, with the last word underlined twice. "My mother wrote that," the milliner said. "She was a seamstress. She never had a window of her own." Ada mixed the gold size and asked how tall the letters should be, and the milliner said she did not mind, so long as it was readable from the bus stop.

Ada worked three mornings on it, the slow way, starting with the capitals and leaving the tails of the script for last so her wrist would not smear them. On the fourth morning the window stood finished and wet with cold light, and the milliner came out with a cup of tea and stood a long time reading it backwards from the pavement.

"It's too big," she said at last. "Make it smaller. Put it where only people who come close can see." So Ada scraped the gold away and began again, a line no wider than a thumbnail, tucked low in the corner of the glass. A week later a girl in a school coat stopped to tie her shoelace there and read it under her breath, and Ada, watching from the workshop door, went back inside and let the kettle boil over.