Back of a woman with dark hair showing a thin fine line script tattoo reading Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. between the shoulder blades.

Script quote across the upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows the upper back of a woman with long dark hair pulled over one shoulder, wearing a black strappy top and a thin gold chain. A script tattoo reads Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. in a fine, single blue-black line sitting between the shoulder blades. The plain pale grey background keeps the focus on the lettering and the smooth skin.

Fine line Lettering Back Quote Script Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Pryce's returned almanac came back to the mobile library on a Tuesday with a slip of card pressed flat inside the cover. Dennis Oakes, who drove the van because nobody else would, held it under the strip light in the depot at Hebden Bridge and read the words twice before he said anything.

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The handwriting was small and joined, in a blue biro pressed hard enough to dent the card. Stay hungry. Stay foolish. There was no name, only a date stamp from the old branch, 1986. Dennis remembered a woman in a yellow anorak who used to ask for poetry in the back of the van and then borrow cookery books she never returned.

He spent his lunch breaks ringing round. The branch had closed, the cookery books still sat overdue on a system that had not existed when the ink went down, and the county archive had no record of a Mrs Pryce at all. In the end he found her through the parish magazine: Ada Lightfoot, ninety-one, living above a chip shop in Todmorden, who opened her door with a tea towel over one shoulder and let him in without asking why.

She read the card for a long time. "I wrote that for a lad who wanted to leave," she said. "He did. I told him to keep being curious and not to mind looking daft." She took a biro from her apron pocket, turned the card over, and wrote the date beneath the old one. Dennis drove back with the card on the passenger seat, belted in, and felt absurdly that he had been given something to keep rather than return.