Black handwritten script lettering tattooed across a person's upper back and shoulder blade, with a hand resting on the shoulder.

Script quote across a shoulder blade

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A multi-line block of cursive script in black ink runs down the upper back, following the curve of the shoulder blade. The lettering is fine and even, with thin strokes and no shading, and the skin tone is smooth and well lit. The composition is close and focused on the text, with dark nail varnish and dark hair framing the edges and a white lace top at the lower right.

Lettering Back Quote Script Handwriting Text

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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

Rain had been coming off the canvas awnings of Kirkgate Market since eight, and Ruth had given up pretending she could stay dry. She was minding the second-hand book stall for her cousin Mo, who had gone to Halifax with a bad back and a worse temper. Beneath a tray of tangled reading glasses she found a notebook with a marbled cover, its pages filled with a slanted hand she recognised at once.

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It was her grandmother Edie's practice book, the kind she had used to teach Ruth to join her letters at a kitchen table. Most pages were lists: stamps, bread, the names of hens. Near the back, one passage had been copied out three times, each attempt neater than the last. Those who have hurt you cannot keep hurting you unless you hold on to the pain. Your past is the past. Nothing will change it, so learn from it for your own sake, and then let it go.

Ruth read it standing in the drip, a customer waiting with a damp paperback of Trollope. She thought of Edie's wrist moving slowly across the oilcloth, and the fountain pen nobody else was allowed to touch. Had she copied it because she needed to hear it, or because she was practising, the way Ruth had once practised her times tables? On the last attempt a raindrop had landed on the word 'go' and bloomed it into a small blue cloud.

She sold the book for a pound less than it was worth, tucked the notebook inside her coat, and walked out past the fishmongers into the wet. At the bus shelter she turned to the blank page after the quotations and wrote her own first line, the letters a little unsteady: Gran, I am letting it go.