Fine line black script tattoo running down the spine of a woman seated at a bar, photographed from behind.

Script quote running down the spine

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman seen from behind wears a pale open-back top and sits at a wooden bar. A thin vertical line of small black script runs down the centre of her back, appearing to be Latin-style lettering, though much of it is too small to read clearly. The ink is dark grey-black against warm skin, and the lettering sits in the middle of the frame with the bar and background softly lit.

Fine line Lettering Back Script Lettering Text Spine Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The queen's clerks had argued all winter about the rule of the salt roads, and in the end it was Wenna the copyist who was sent up the Tallow Stair with a single pot of iron ink and orders to write the law in one unbroken line from the top of the tower to the cellar door. She was nineteen and had never lifted a pen without a second pair of eyes on it.

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The clerks wanted the words short, but Wenna copied what the old charter said, and the charter was longer than the stair. With every step down the line thinned as the ink ran out, and twice she had to stop and breathe on the nib to coax it back. On the eleventh landing a grey cat sat on the sill and watched her with the patience of something that had seen a great many laws come and go.

At the bottom the ink was nearly dry. She had one word left and could not remember whether it took the double letter or the single. She wrote it with the double, then sat down on the cold flags and waited for the queen's men to come and read it aloud.

They read it. Nobody could agree on what it meant, so they agreed it meant whatever the road did, and the salt carts have followed that single black line ever since, down the tower and out across the marsh to the sea.