Black cursive lettering of a poem runs down the back of a neck in a lettering tattoo, photographed from behind.

Script lyrics down the back of the neck

Lettering · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A block of black cursive script runs vertically down the back of the neck, set out as a poem of about a dozen short lines. The linework is clean and fairly fine, and the lettering is solid black with no shading. The photograph is taken from behind, with dark hair pinned up, a stud earring visible and a black top strap at the lower edge of the frame.

Lettering Fine line Neck Lyric Script Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last train before the line closed for engineering went through Harrow Cross at twenty past eleven, and I was the only one in the box to see the woman get off it. Nobody got off at Harrow Cross. The platform was a lamp, a bench and a rusted name board the parish had stopped painting in the sixties. She stood under the lamp with a canvas holdall and looked at the fields as if they owed her money.

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I rang through to Ashby and told them there was a passenger. Ashby said the signal was green for nothing. I went out with the hand lamp anyway. She asked me for the road to the sea. I said it was eleven miles and no bus until morning. She said she had walked further for less, and that she had a debt to settle with the tide before the tide settled with her. I didn't ask what she meant. Men on nights learn not to.

Dew was coming down on the rails in a fine silver skin, the way it does in late August, so that every sleeper caught the lamp. She told me her brother had sworn an oath to the water and broken it, and that she had come to see the oath kept, or to keep it herself. She said silence was the only currency that ever bought anything worth having. Then she laughed, not unkindly, and asked whether the signal would still be green when she got back.

I never saw her leave. At six the milk train found the bench empty and a single wet footprint on the step, pointing towards the marsh. The holdall was gone. In the signal box logbook, under my last entry, someone had written in a neat, slanting hand: the dew has done its work, the road is clear. I have kept that page. Each morning the sun lifts the mist off the rails, and I think of her walking out over the grey sands with the whole sky held above her like a lamp.