Close-up of a black script tattoo reading I am enough the way I am across a person's upper back near the shoulder.

Script quote across upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A close-up photograph of a single line of black cursive script across the upper back, running from the shoulder area towards the centre of the back. The lettering uses thin, slightly slanted strokes with some variation in weight, and the ink appears dark and crisp against the skin. A thin gold chain sits above the tattoo and a grey top is visible at the lower edge, with the shot framed tightly on the skin and hair.

Lettering Back Script Quote Word

Find an artist for this

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

Tobiah, the sluice froze again overnight, so I am writing this by the stove with my gloves still on, which means you will have to forgive the wobble in the letters. I found the seed tin you asked about. It was behind the flour, under a folded map of a coastline that no longer exists. Gran's hand is all over the lid. She wrote the same line in three different scripts, one of them slanted so hard it looks like it is leaning into a wind.

Keep reading

I am enough the way I am. That's the one that caught me. She used to say a sign-writer's job was to make a sentence stand up straight without making it stiff, and she'd practise on the back of ration slips, over and over, until the strokes loosened into something that looked like breath. Mum said it was a waste of good ink. Gran said ink was the one thing in the valley that never ran out.

The council sent a man on Tuesday with a stencil and a proposal to repaint the Tern's hull with new numbers, because the old ones have worn off in the salt. He wanted to know what the tin's words meant, since they would make a nice bit of decoration along the bow. I told him I didn't know, which is true. But when he left I took the tin down, held it up to the window, and realised the line had never been meant for whoever read it on a shelf. It was for whoever would open the tin one day, find the paper tired and thin, and still expect to be there.

I'm going to leave it where it is, above the stove, where the first light hits it. Come home before the thaw and tell me what you think she was trying to say.