Back tattoo of two figures in fedoras with a script name between them, in black and grey with some red and colour detail, placed across the middle of the back.

Script name and two fedora figures on a back

Realism · Back · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a black and grey figure in a fedora with an arm raised at the top, a fine-line script name with a looping initial and a star-like flourish in the centre, and a lower full-colour figure in a fedora, dark jacket and trousers. The figures use soft shading and realistic proportions, while the script is drawn in thin, unshaded black linework. Colour appears in the lower figure's red hat band and pink shirt, and the composition runs vertically down the back with plain skin around it.

Realism Lettering Back Figure Script Name Star Jacket

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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

You are sewing the red band back onto Uncle Tomas's fedora at the kitchen table when the afternoon whistle goes, and the thread snaps twice before the knot holds. Nobody in Corrie Vale owns a jacket fit for the Saturday dance, so you have his, the black one with shoulders cut for a bigger man, and a pink shirt your sister bought off a market stall and never wore. Your mother says the dust will get in your lungs long before the dancing does. You tell her the dust has been in them since your grandfather's day.

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The hall smells of floor polish and wet coats. Mr Ellery winds the gramophone and the needle crackles across a record somebody's brother brought back from Cardiff, and the room goes quiet the way a shaft does when the roof settles. You stand by the urn with your hat tipped low and wait for Nessa Owen to look up. She does. You lift your arm to the height of your shoulder, fingers pointing at the rafters, the way you practised in the coal shed, and somebody at the back whistles.

Afterwards she asks your name, so you take a raffle stub from your pocket and write it on the back in a loop that starts as a capital and runs away into a spiral, then finish with three thin strokes like a firework going up over the slag heap. She folds it into her glove without reading it properly. You walk home with the hat in your hand, the lamps of the terraces going on one by one, and you think that if the pit closes on Monday, at least for one song the whole village looked up.