Close-up of a small black fine line script tattoo reading iloveyou on the upper back near the shoulder.

Script phrase below the shoulder

Fine line · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A small black script tattoo reading iloveyou sits on the upper back near the top of the shoulder blade. The linework is thin and even, with a slight variation in stroke weight, and the lettering is set on a gentle diagonal. The skin is warm toned and the background is softly out of focus, keeping attention on the text.

Fine line Lettering Shoulder Script Phrase

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 rain had found the gap in the chapel roof again, so Hester Bowen moved her chisel to the dry side of the sill and kept working. Her husband had been gone since Lammas, carrying salt fish and iron down to Bristol on a hired cutter, and the steward wanted the gatehouse lintel recut before the assize judges came through in October. The old carving had worn to nothing. Nobody in the parish could read the Latin any more, so the steward had asked for something plain.

Keep reading

She did not do plain. She drew the words first on a slate, then in pencil on tracing paper, and found they would not sit straight across the stone. They wanted a lean forward, like a man walking into weather. She tilted the line and the letters agreed. Then she set the drawing aside and cut a small phrase into the inside of the postern arch, where no judge would look and no steward would think to check: iloveyou, run together the way she wrote it on the back of every letter she sent him, because a space cost a halfpenny at the post office and she had never liked to spend it.

The cutter came back on the first frost. He climbed through the broken gatehouse with his cap in his hand and found her kneeling in the dust of the postern, and before he could speak she pointed with the chisel. He ran his thumb along the groove, then along the next, and read it twice before he laughed. "Costs a halfpenny to write it properly," she said, "and I never could spare one."

That night the rain came through the arch as it always did, ran down into the cut letters and stayed there, so the words glinted in the lantern light long after the rest of the stone had dried.