Black script lettering tattoo across an upper back, reading 'You make beautiful things out of dust Gen. 2:7', placed over the shoulder blade.

Script quote across the upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph of a script quote tattooed across the upper back, reading 'You make beautiful things out of dust' with a 'Gen. 2:7' reference set in a smaller upright italic beneath it. The lettering is in black ink with a slightly softer grey edge, and the lines are fairly thin and even. The phrase steps down diagonally across the skin, with the subject's hair visible at the top of the frame and the face not shown.

Lettering Back Quote Script Scripture Bible verse

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The third coat of size had gone tacky by the time the lorry pulled up outside the pottery, and Ruth had to decide whether to wait or strip the letters back with turpentine and start again. She waited. Her father had taught her that a sign-writer who rushed the gilding ended up apologising to the weather for the rest of his life. The wall of the shed ran forty feet along the road out of Tenmile Wells, and every driver who stopped for water read it before they read anything else.

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Her grandfather had lettered it in 1961, when her grandmother's first kiln cracked in a dust storm and she sat down in the yard with a bowl of shards and refused to get up. He painted the line in a looping hand that Ruth had copied from the old photographs, letter by letter, down to the little flick on the tail of the y. Edith had said it every time a pot came out of the fire broken and she mended it anyway, with gold in the seams and a shrug. Ruth had never once heard her say it without the shrug.

A man in a dusty cap came round the side of the shed with a flask in his hand and asked whether it was from the Bible. Ruth said it was from Genesis, and that it was her gran's line before it was anyone else's. He nodded like that answered something he had been carrying a long way.

When the last stroke was down, she laid her palm flat on the wet gold and felt the faint grit of the road come up through the paint. She let the dust settle on the letters and did not brush it off, because that was where it belonged.