Black script lettering tattoo across a woman's upper back and shoulder blade, with a long braid falling over her left shoulder.

Script quote tattoo across upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman is photographed from behind, with her back bare and a long single braid hanging over one shoulder. A black script quote is tattooed across the upper back, set in several lines of fine, cursive lettering. The image uses a soft, warm colour tone against a plain pale wall, with the lettering as the clear focus.

Lettering Back Script Quote Text Braid Hair Back

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lodger in the back room has been counting his breaths since the Tuesday you carried his tea up the stairs, and by Friday you have started counting them with him. Mrs Halloran at number nine says the sea air will do it, that a man worn out in the city needs a plain week by the water and nothing to read but the tide tables. You bring him the tide tables anyway. He thanks you the way people thank a clock.

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On Saturday the wind comes off the Channel with salt in it and the whole front of the house rattles like a ship's hold. You find him at the open sash with his cardigan buttoned wrong and a pencil in his fingers, writing on the back of a laundry list in a script so fine it looks like thread. He doesn't turn around. He crosses out three lines and starts again, and when you ask who the letter is for, he says, 'Someone who kept a boarding house on Harrow Lane. She'd have told me to stop fussing.'

You take the list down to the post box on the harbour wall, where the ink runs in the spray. Edie Marr at the counter reads the address and lifts her eyebrows. The widow on Harrow Lane has been dead eleven years. Edie stamps it anyway. 'Some letters are only for the sending,' she says, and gives you a look that suggests she has sent a few herself.

Back at the house the room is bare, the bed made square, the window shut. On the sill he has left the pencil and a pressed sea-pink. Beside it, in that careful thread of a hand, is one last line meant for you to keep: it's the moments that catch in your chest that matter, not the number of breaths it takes to reach them.