Black ink lettering tattoo of a block of scripture text across a person's upper back and shoulder blade.

Scripture lettering across a back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large block of black lettering covers the upper back and shoulder blade, with the words set in mixed display and script typefaces at varying sizes. The letterforms use solid black ink with fine serifs, flourishes and drips, and the text forms a shape that descends from the shoulder. The image is in black and grey tones against plain skin with no colour.

Lettering Back Text Scripture Lettering Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had shut the Ferrier Arms for four days when Mrs Oakley asked me to repaint the board above the tap room. It was an old slate, the gilt gone to brown, and the words on it had been put up by a man who thought a capital letter was a kind of threat. I had brushes, a pot of lamp black and a pot of size, and nothing else to do but wait for the lane to be ploughed.

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The landlord's boy watched me work. He wanted the letters bigger. He wanted drips down the sides, a swash on the capitals, little sprigs that would make the thing look like a funeral card. I told him a board should be read by a man with his hat still on, so every word had to stand up straight in the wind. He thought I was being fussy. I was being careful, which is not the same, though my father never could tell the difference either.

On the last evening a stranger came in off the moor with frost in his eyebrows and asked what the old board said. I told him it was the passage about the valley, the keeper, the lost children, and the hand that falls on the wicked. He laughed and said nobody had ever read the whole of it. I said nobody reads anything in a snowstorm but the bill. He left a coin on the bar for a half he never drank and went back out into the white.

When the plough finally came, I carried the board out to the yard to dry. Next morning the coin was gone and in its place lay a folded scrap of paper with one line in pencil: the letters are fine, mind the drips. I hung the board that spring. The drips are still there, and whenever I pass beneath it I think about how steady a hand must be to write a warning that neat.