Back view of a woman with an upswept auburn bun and a black sequined low-back dress, showing a fine-line script lettering tattoo across the upper back below the neck.

Script quote across the upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows a woman seen from behind, with her face not visible, wearing a black sequined dress with a low back. A single line of thin, cursive script reads as a quotation across the upper back, just below the nape of the neck. The ink is dark blue-grey and the lettering uses fine, even linework with no shading, against soft-focus people in the background.

Lettering Back Script Quote 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

The chalk keeps breaking in your fingers, so you learn to hold it lightly, the way Mr Ansell holds his pen. He stands you at the potting-shed wall at the bottom of the kitchen garden before the frost has lifted off the lawn and tells you to write the line again. Thin strokes, he says, no pressure, let the letters lean like grass in a wind that isn't there.

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You have been at it since March. The line comes from a book he keeps wrapped in oilcloth on the high shelf, its spine gone soft as bread. All that we see or seem, you write, and your capitals wobble. Is but a dream within a dream. He raps the brickwork with his knuckle. Every word has to carry the same weight, or the whole thing sags like a bridge built by someone who was half asleep.

By June the roses have gone over and the wall is grey with dust. He tells you to stop copying and write it without looking. Your hand moves, and for once the line sits level, the S's curling like bindweed. He studies it for a long time, says nothing, and goes off to put the kettle on.

That evening the rain comes in sideways and the wall runs clean. You stand in the wet garden with your fingers blue and understand the joke. The words were never the point. The point was the hand that learned to hold them steady enough to be washed away.