Black script lettering running vertically down a woman's spine on her back, with a long braid falling over one shoulder.

Script quote down the spine

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman seen from behind, sitting with her bare back to the camera. A fine-line black script quote runs down the centre of her spine, with the visible words reading "What matters most is how well you walk through" before the lower lines are cropped. The lettering is crisp, with thin strokes and flowing capitals, and the skin tone is warm and even. The braided hair, pale wall and grey metal trunk make up a soft, neutral background.

Lettering Fine line Back Script text Quote Spine Braid Hair

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The trunk came up from the cellar on the Tuesday, still smelling of wet coal dust and the carbolic soap Dad swore by, and Mam would not let anyone open it until the kettle had boiled twice. When the lid finally gave, the first thing I saw was a copybook with a cracked green cover, and the second was my own name written across the front in a hand I hardly knew.

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Inside, every page held the same sentence, copied out in careful loops at the top of each line: What matters most is how well you walk through. Some lines were neat, the capitals flowing as if they had been poured. Further in they went shaky and then steady again, as if whoever held the pen had been down a shaft and come back up to finish it. Miss Ferris at the chapel school had set us lines like that, but she never set us the same one forty times.

I took the book down to the pit head on Thursday, past the wash-house and the slag heaps grey with rain. Mr Coyle, the overman, read the line off the cover, snorted, and said the only thing that mattered down there was whether the roof held. Then he turned to the last page, where the sentence had been written in a boy's wobbly hand, and he went quiet and handed it back without a word.

I walked home the long way, over the stile where the path bends toward the reservoir, and sat on the wall to copy the words one more time. My pen was a bent nib from the kitchen drawer. The ink ran thin, then thick, and I let it.