Black and white photo of a woman with long hair seen from behind, with a fine line script tattoo reading La vita è bella on her upper back near the shoulder.

Script quote on upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph shows a woman with long hair seen from behind, her face not visible. A small cursive script tattoo reading La vita è bella sits on her upper back near the shoulder blade. The thin, dark lettering stands out against bare skin, and the raised hand at the right edge of the frame draws attention away from the tattoo.

Lettering Back Shoulder Script Text Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The brush was too fine for the glass, and Ettore knew it before he dipped it. Signwriters in Bologna learned to distrust a hairline stroke on a wet pane, because it wandered when the hand shook, and his hand had shaken since the winter his wife moved to Milan. Still, Signora Rizzo wanted her sentence on the tailor's window by Friday, in the old looped script that made every word look like a bored signature.

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The words were hers. She had copied them from a card pinned inside a tram, three words she half remembered from a film. La vita è bella. Ettore said the phrase was too cheerful for a shop selling black wool to undertakers. She laughed until she had to sit on the step. 'Paint it anyway,' she said. 'The man inside has no need of it. Somebody passing does.'

He worked through Thursday night with the lamp hissing and a tram bell ringing down Via Indipendenza. Halfway through the è the accent came out crooked, leaning like a drunk against a wall. He reached for the razor blade, then stopped. His own father had written crooked accents on every letter from the front, and his mother had kept each one anyway, pinned above the stove.

On Friday the sun came through the wet glass and threw the letters onto the pavement backwards, so a schoolboy stopped, sounded them out in reverse and laughed. Signora Rizzo brought out two coffees and read the words the right way round. She said nothing about the accent. She only held her cup in both hands and waited until the boy had gone on to school.