Black script lettering reading a Bible verse across the upper back, near the shoulder blade, with a black lace top strap visible.

Scripture lettering across upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo is a three-line quotation in black cursive script with a smaller italic verse reference below it, set across the upper back near the shoulder blade. The linework is clean and even, with solid black letterforms and soft grey shading at the edges. The photograph is taken at close range in warm tones, with the text filling most of the frame and a hand resting at the lower right.

Lettering Back Script Quote Scripture Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dorothy Pask had painted hoardings for thirty-one years and never once been handed a sentence that wouldn't fit its board. This one was for the chapel at Clee Cross, a long pale fence along the lane past the gravel pits, and the minister had asked for three lines above a smaller line of reference. 'Make it sing,' he'd said, which was no use to anyone holding a brush.

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She worked it out on brown paper first, counting letters against the width of the boards with a pencil stub. The trouble was the middle line. 'Through Christ who' crowded under 'I can do all things' unless she let the loops lean into one another like people queuing at a bus stop, and even then the capital C wanted room it didn't have. Her nephew Terry held the stepladder and read the words aloud, slowly, the way boys read when they're not sure where the stresses go.

The lorries came past all week, flinging grit into the wet black. On the Thursday a driver pulled onto the verge, walked up with his hands in his jacket, and read the board from start to finish with his lips moving. He asked whether she'd done it for the chapel or for herself. She said the chapel paid, and he laughed and said that wasn't what he meant.

She painted the reference last, in a heavier italic, because numbers always looked lost on their own. By evening the sun sat low and threw the letters long across the verge. Terry asked if it was finished. 'Not till the paint's skinned over,' she said, and went to put the kettle on, leaving the board to hold its three lines against the dusk.