Black script tattoo reading Dream as if you'll live forever and Live as if you'll die today across the upper back, with a feather and beads on the right shoulder blade.

Script quote and feather across upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The upper back shows two lines of black cursive script, reading Dream as if you'll live forever and Live as if you'll die today. A feather with small beads hangs from the right shoulder blade, shaded in black and grey with fine detail. The photograph is taken from behind, with dark hair pulled up and a black strap visible against pale skin.

Lettering Back Quote Script Feather Bead

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The brush was too fine for the job, so Ada Pym thinned the black with turpentine and took her time over the capitals. Mr Oddie wanted the lines across his pawnshop window on Harbour Street, and he wanted them to look like handwriting, not board-painter's blocks. 'Dream as if you'll live forever,' he read from the scrap of card, frowning at it. 'Who says that to a pawnbroker?'

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'Someone who lost a good coat,' Ada said, not looking up. She had the second line going now, the loop of the L curling like a fishing line. Her own father had pawned their wireless here in the winter of the strike, and she had never told Oddie that she came in afterwards to stand at the counter and watch him weigh it. The feather was a smaller commission, drawn in pencil in the margin of the card: a quill with beads strung down it in turquoise and red, because the customer had asked for it and paid in advance.

Oddie fetched a cup of tea and stood by the door while the letters dried. 'Funny, that. Live as if you'll die today. Sounds like a man with no savings.' Ada dipped her brush again and didn't argue. From the pavement the words would read backwards, the way a letter does held up to a mirror, so she climbed the stepladder and wrote the whole thing again on the inside of the glass, where only people in the shop could read it the right way round.

Oddie came out at dusk to look at it. He read it from the inside, lips moving, then went back in and put the kettle on without a word.