Fine line black script tattoo running vertically down the centre of a person's back along the spine, shown from behind with hair tied up.

Script line down the spine

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph from behind of a person with bare shoulders and back, showing a single vertical line of cursive script running down the centre of the spine. The thin black linework is fairly small and the lettering is hard to read at this resolution. The warm, soft lighting and bedding in the background sit around the tattoo, which is the clear focus of the frame.

Fine line Lettering Back Script Word Spine

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 first cane goes in on the morning the frost lifts, and you will be tempted to tie it loosely because your fingers are cold and the twine is stiff. Don't. Pull it taut against the south wall, where the brick holds the day's warmth, and work the string up in one unbroken line so the beans have something to climb that won't give in August wind. Your grandmother did it that way. She wrote everything in the back of the seed ledger in the same slanted hand, a single thin stroke from the bottom of the page to the top, and she never let a word run off the margin.

Keep reading

The ledger lives in the potting shed, under the tin of pea sticks. Read it before you sow anything. Between the dates and the rainfall figures you'll find a sentence copied out in pencil, then gone over in ink, then crossed through with one neat rule. The rest of the page is weather. The pencil is still faint enough to read if you tilt the book towards the window, but you'll need to do that yourself, because I never could.

Leave the last plant at the end of the row unpicked. Let it flower, let it set its pods, and let it climb the string past the gutter even when the neighbours complain about the shade. The beans come up slowly in a cold spring and quickly in a warm one, and neither tells you anything about what you're supposed to do.

In September the top runner reaches the eaves. You'll find it has wound itself around the string in a neat, downward curl, as if it had been reading over your shoulder and decided to follow the line.