Black and grey photograph of a fine line script quote reading You'll never know dear, how much I love you, running diagonally across a person's upper back below the shoulder.

Script quote across a shoulder blade

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph shows a bare upper back and shoulder with a handwritten script quote in thin black ink. The words run diagonally from the shoulder blade up towards the neck, with the lettering fine and evenly weighted. The soft focus background and shallow depth of field keep attention on the skin and the tattoo.

Lettering Fine line Back Script Quote Handwriting Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the peel, the lot of you, and sit still while I tell it. Walter Pyke kept the letter tent at the back of Greave's Travelling Fair, squeezed between the coconut shy and the wagon where they stored the mangle and the strongman's bad knee. He wrote for men who could not, a penny a page, in a hand so fine it looked like thread pulled through cloth.

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One wet October a carter's boy called Tom Haddow ducked under the flap with his cap in both hands. He could not write, he said, and he could not say it straight either, not with the whole fairground listening. So he talked and Walter wrote. Tom wanted Nell at the bakery stall in Market Rasen told that the frost had come early and he had slept in his coat. Walter set it down, then stopped with his pen lifted. Tom had gone red to the ears. He asked whether the last line could go at the bottom, sloping up off the page like a swallow leaving a fence. You'll never know, dear, how much I love you, he said, as if reading it off a board.

The letter went out on Monday's post, and the fair moved on Tuesday, always one town ahead of it. Three weeks later a reply came addressed to Greave's in care of nobody in particular, in a round, careful hand that had clearly been practised at a kitchen table. It said only that the frost had come early in Market Rasen too, and that she had read the bottom line four times and would be at the Lincoln fair on the first Saturday, if he could manage to stand still long enough to be looked at.

Walter folded it into his waistcoat and never charged Tom for the second letter. He wrote it free, in the same thread-fine hand, and it began, as all good letters should, with the weather.