Close-up of a black script lettering tattoo reading "Don't paint me black when I used to be golden" across the upper chest near the shoulder.

Script lyric quote tattoo across upper chest

Lettering · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo is a line of cursive script in black ink, set across the upper chest near the collarbone and running up towards the shoulder edge. The lettering has smooth, even strokes with solid fill and no visible shading, and the skin tone around it is light and unshaded. The frame is tightly cropped, with red hair at the top and a hand with dark plum nails resting at the lower right.

Lettering Chest Shoulder Script Quote Lyric Nail polish

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Pryce wanted the old fascia gone by Friday, and he wanted it black. I had the size-two brush loaded with enamel before the ladder was steady, because the gold leaf on the Nightingale's glass was lifting in curls and there was no saving it. Dad always said you could tell a sign-writer by how he stood with his back to the street, and I stood like a man who had been told to whitewash a chapel.

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Mrs Oddie came out of the bakery opposite with flour to her elbows and watched me work. She had bought her first loaf from that window in 1961, she said, when the letters were so bright you could read them from the bus shelter. I told her the gilding had been done by a man called Tanner, who was dead now, and I was only the one who had to cover him up. She didn't laugh. She asked if I would keep one letter, just one, and I said the paint wouldn't know the difference.

I kept the capital N. It was the only part of the old name that still caught the light at four in the afternoon when the sun came off the canal, so I left it bare under the black, a small window in the lettering. Nobody in the parish has asked me why. The new owner, a young lad with a vape and a laptop, thinks it's a mistake and has asked twice whether I can fix it.

Mrs Oddie died last winter. The gold is still under there, I know it is, because the paint is thin where the N sits and the shine comes through when the light is low. I drive past most mornings and look for it, the way you'd look for a face in a crowd, and I tell myself that is the whole of the story.