Black script lettering reading a life without love is no life at all, tattooed across the upper back in lettering style.

Script quote across the upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a tattoo on a person's back, with the words a life without love is no life at all written in black script across three staggered lines. The linework is smooth and even, with the letters set at slight angles to follow the curve of the back. The image is entirely black ink on skin, with a red fabric edge visible at the top left.

Lettering Back Quote Text Love Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The post comes to the rock on Tuesdays when the boat can land, and this Tuesday there was nothing but a brown envelope addressed in my husband's careful hand, though Edwin has been in the ground since March. I sat on the step with the tide coming in around the boots and opened it anyway. Inside was a page torn from the ledger he kept for the lamp oil, and on the back, in pencil, he had written the same line over and over until the paper thinned: a life without love is no life at all. Forty years I thought that was the sort of thing men put on samplers.

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Mrs Pryce from the mainland office came out in the afternoon to see about the cottage. She found me still on the step, the page on my knee, and she asked whether I'd like the kettle on. I said no. I said I was trying to work out whether he had meant it as a comfort or a scolding. She laughed, the way people do when they think you have gone soft in the head, and said that Edwin never scolded anyone in his life.

That was the trouble, I told her. He never scolded, and he never once said the thing outright, so I had to sit here with a ledger page and a pencil and hear it in his voice. I went up to the lamp room that evening and the light was turning slowly over the water, bright and patient, and I thought, well, Edwin, you were right about the dark. I went down, put the kettle on myself, and left the door open.