Black and grey script lettering with scroll flourishes running across a shoulder and upper back.

Scripted quote with flourishes on shoulder

Lettering · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a script quote tattoo across the shoulder and upper back, set in black ink with grey shading. Fine, cursive lettering runs diagonally across the skin, with ornamental scrolls framing the start and end of the lines. The skin tone is warm, the lighting is soft, and the frame is tightly cropped around the tattoo.

Lettering Shoulder Back Script Quote Flourish Scroll

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mags Pennock had painted signs on the harbour at Skerryvoe for forty years, and when the old ferry Heron was sold to a man from the mainland, she was asked to letter a new name across her bow. She said she would do it the old way, with a fine brush and a stick of gold leaf, and the buyer said that was fine so long as the spelling was right.

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She came down to the slip on a grey morning with her tins in a biscuit box. The boat was stripped to the timber, and the hull smelled of tar and wet rope. She sat on an upturned creel and worked out the lettering on a board first, letting the brush run loose and curling the tails of the capitals into little scrolls, the way her mother had taught her, because her mother said a line of writing should look as if it had somewhere to go.

The buyer had not asked for the name after all. He said the boat would carry sheep in the summer and his nephew to university in the autumn, and he wanted something on her side to remember where she had been. Mags copied out the verse he had read from a card in his coat pocket: I understand where God has brought me from, therefore I trust in where he is taking me. She painted it along the strake in black, and shaded each letter grey so the light would catch it at dusk.

When the paint dried, the boat went out on the first tide with the nephew at the wheel. Mags watched from the slip until the stern slid past the point. The words were still plain on the water side, running ahead of the bow the way a wake does, and she stood there until the gulls had settled back onto the pier.