Close-up of a black script tattoo reading I lost myself in us across the upper back, near the shoulder blade, with red hair falling over the shoulder.

Script quote across upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black script phrase reading I lost myself in us runs horizontally across the upper back, close to the shoulder blade. The linework is thin and even, with no shading, and the lettering is set on a slight diagonal. The skin around the tattoo is reddened, and a black top strap crosses the right side of the frame against a plain, pale background.

Lettering Back Script Quote Text Phrase

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bus from Penzance let me off at the top of the hill in a wind that tried to take my hat, so I walked the last half mile with the postcard crushed in my fist. Mrs Pascoe has kept the boarding house on Carrick Terrace for forty years and has never once asked a guest their business, which is why I came back here, to the room with the blue counterpane where Daniel and I spent our first August.

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The postcard had arrived in March, bent at one corner from being shoved through a letterbox too small for it. Most of the front was a picture of a lighthouse I had never seen. On the back, in his square capitals, he had crossed out so many false starts that the card looked stitched. Underneath, in the slanting hand I'd learned from him at school, he had written the thing he had been trying to say for a year: I lost myself in us. I read it on the stairs and sat on the third step until the lamp in the hall clicked on by itself.

I unpacked slowly. The room smelled of furniture polish and salt. At the window I wrote the sentence on the cold glass with one fingertip, the way children write their names in the steam of a bath, and watched the letters bloom and then fade. Past the harbour wall the tide was coming in over the rocks where we used to dare each other to stand until our shoes went under.

In the morning the glass had cleared, but the last word still showed when the light came through at an angle, faint as a bruise. I packed my own things and left the postcard on the sill. Whoever took the room next could read it or not.