Black script lettering reading Dreams are our escape from reality on the upper back near the shoulder blade, seen over a white vest top.

Script quote across upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a black script quotation across the upper back, running diagonally from near the shoulder blade towards the spine. The thin, fairly uniform linework reads as a handwritten or calligraphic style, with a decorative capital D and some letters joined by flowing strokes. The ink is solid black on light skin, and the soft natural daylight and plain background keep the focus on the lettering.

Lettering Back Quote Script Word Text Handwriting

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Forty-one days out of Avonmouth, the barometer had stopped being interesting, and Mr Pryce had started copying verses onto the chart-room slate in his careful copperplate. He wrote one line each night, then rubbed it out before the morning watch so the owners would not find sentiment on their ledger paper. I held the lamp for him because the lamp was my job, and because he paid me a shilling a week to keep my mouth shut.

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The book came from a passenger who had left us at Funchal, a widow with grey gloves who read on the aft well deck until the spray got into the pages. She forgot it on the rail. The paper had gone wavy, and somebody had underlined one sentence in pencil, so Pryce took it as instruction. Dreams are our escape from reality, he wrote, and the chalk squeaked on the last word as though it had objections.

On the third night the Atlantic tried to climb over the rail, I asked him what it meant. He didn't look up. 'It means a man can sleep through a gale and wake up somewhere else, Gilchrist. It doesn't mean he's safe there.'

We raised the Chilean coast in March. Pryce went ashore with his cardboard suitcase and no slate, and I found the last line still faint on the wooden panel beside the chart table, where the chalk had dusted through the varnish. I left it there. Some lines are too stubborn to scrub off, and the ship was not mine to scrub.