Back view of a woman in a lace dress with a small black script tattoo on her upper back near the shoulder.

Script tattoo on upper back in lace dress

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A close, soft-focus photograph taken from behind shows a woman in a lace dress with covered buttons running down the back. A small tattoo of script lettering sits high on her upper back near the shoulder, and the words are too small and blurred to read. The ink appears dark against the skin, and the muted cream and white tones of the dress and background give the image a calm, neutral palette.

Lettering Back Script Lettering Lace Button

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The buttons were the problem. Forty-two of them, each covered in the same ivory silk as the dress, and Maud's mother had insisted on doing every one herself at the back of the church hall because the seamstress was in Leeds and the wedding was on Saturday. Marjorie Pell had never been a patient woman, and she was not patient now, muttering through a mouthful of pins while the florist's van idled outside.

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"Stand still, you wriggle like a landed trout," she said. Maud did not wriggle. She was looking at the cream-coloured wall where a ladder leaned, and at the long window beyond it, where the light came in flat and grey over the car park. She was thinking about the words she had inked on her shoulder three years earlier, in a studio above a chip shop in Hull, the lettering so small the artist had asked twice if she was sure. She was sure. The words were her grandfather's, and nobody in the room knew them except her.

Her mother fastened the last button near the base of the spine and sat back on her heels. For a moment neither of them spoke. Then Marjorie reached up, tugged the lace straight across her daughter's shoulders, and said, very quietly, "He would have hated this dress."

"He would have loved the buttons," Maud said. "He always did like a fiddly job."

Marjorie laughed, a short surprised sound, and pressed her forehead briefly between Maud's shoulder blades, just above the small dark script. Then she stood, dusted off her knees and went to see about the flowers, leaving her daughter alone in the hall with forty-two buttons and nothing left to do but walk.