Fine line script tattoo running vertically down the spine on a person's bare back, shown in a sepia-toned photograph.

Script line running down the spine

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A person is seen from behind, with their head out of frame and their bare back filling most of the image. A thin, handwritten-style line of script runs vertically along the centre of the spine, with the lettering too small to read clearly at this resolution. The ink is dark and the photograph is sepia toned, with the subject lit softly against a dark background and rumpled bedding at the lower right.

Fine line Lettering Back Script Text Spine

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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

Dear Ruth, the rain has come in sideways off the river again and the awning at the Thursday market is sagging like a wet sail, so I am writing this under the counter with the till drawer open for shelter. You will laugh, but I have spent the whole morning copying out the lines from your mother's recipe card onto brown paper, because the ink on the original has run into a blue ghost and nobody on the stalls can read it.

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I used the fine nib, the one you said was wasted on anything but poetry. I wrote it down the length of a single strip, from the top edge to the bottom, one word tucked against the next with no gap for breath, so that it looked like a line of stitching. Mr Okafor from the fish stall came over with his hood up and asked what the scribble was for. I told him it was a map of the part of the river that floods. He said he'd have that framed.

By noon the rain had got into the paper and the letters bled into the grain, so that from three feet off you could see only a dark thread running down the middle of the strip. I stood there a long while with my tea going cold. It occurred to me that everything that matters on this market was always going to be like that, legible only up close and only to the people who already knew the words. I've pinned it to the post above the scales. Come and find it before the weather takes it, and bring the good pen.