Black script lettering reading a four-line rhyming poem tattooed across the upper back, near the shoulder blade.

Script poem tattoo on upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

Four lines of black script lettering sit across the upper back, following a gentle diagonal. The linework is smooth and even, with solid black ink and no shading. The skin is light and the background shows a pink wall with framed posters, softly out of focus.

Lettering Back Script Text Rose

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody at Crane and Lyle had ever asked Dennis Pell for a rhyme before, which is why the sticky note on his monitor said, in Mr Okafor's looping capitals, SOMETHING WARM. RHYMES. NOT HARD.

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Dennis tried. He typed "Roses are red" and then sat for twenty minutes while the radiator knocked like a man wanting to be let in. Every line that followed arrived with the wrong number of syllables. He ate a custard cream. He reheated last night's lentil soup in the staff kitchen and stood watching it turn in the orange light, and when the bell pinged he was still thinking about the soup. Back at his desk he typed: My name's Dave. He had never been called Dave in his life.

Mr Okafor read the draft on Monday, laughed for a long time, and sent it to print regardless, because the last line was the only thing anyone in the building would talk about. By spring the card had outsold the sunflower range. Customers wrote in asking who Dave was, and whether the poem was meant to be a riddle, and one woman from Scarborough sent a photograph of her shoulder with the lines inked across it in careful black script.

Dennis never found out who Dave was. He kept a single copy in his wallet, soft at the folds, and each time the microwave pinged in the kitchen he took it out and read the final word aloud, quietly, the way other men might check a train time.