Black script lettering reading learn to love yourself and never hide the scars, with a small butterfly outline, tattooed across the upper back.

Script quote and butterfly tattoo on the back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

Black script lettering in four lines reads learn to love yourself and never hide the scars, with a small outlined butterfly beside the word love. The linework is smooth and dark with no shading, and the text is set in a gently sloping, flowing hand. The image is a close, slightly angled shot of the upper back against dark fabric and a pale strap.

Lettering Back Script Quote Text Butterfly

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mum always said the fair packed up faster than it set up, but nobody warned me the lettering on the Big Wheel would outlast the rest of us. I was nineteen the summer I took over the sign-writing from old Ted Garrity, who had fingers like a heron's feet and kept his brushes soaking in a tin of linseed. Before he went to his sister's in Rhyl, he left me one job: repaint the script along the gondola rails, which had faded to ghosts under three seasons of rain.

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Nessa ran the coconut shy and sat on the bottom step most evenings, watching me work. On the third night she asked what the words meant. I was copying them from a card Ted had left, written in his looping hand: learn to love yourself and never hide the scars. I said I didn't know who'd want that painted on a ride. She said that was exactly why it belonged there, because half the people who came through the gate were walking about with something under their coats.

I finished it in one long evening, the lamps buzzing and moths knocking against the bulbs. Ted's card had no butterfly, so I drew one freehand on the word love, a small outlined thing, my tongue between my teeth like a schoolboy. Nessa came round the back to see and didn't say anything for a while, which from her was a compliment.

The fair moved on to Hull and then to the coast. Two winters later a postcard arrived with a photo of the Wheel lit up against a black sky, the paint still bright on the gondola. On the back, in pencil, she'd written: still going round. I keep it in the lid of Ted's tin, where the linseed smell never quite leaves.