Black script lettering tattoo of the Serenity Prayer running down a person's back, with the words stacked in three sections.

Serenity Prayer script lettering on back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo is a block of flowing script lettering reading the Serenity Prayer, with the words God, Serenity, Courage and Wisdom set in larger letters than the smaller connecting text. The linework is bold and solid in black ink, with soft grey shading giving depth to the larger words. The text runs vertically down the centre of the back and fills most of the frame against plain skin.

Lettering Back Courage Quote Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mason had cut the first line above the gatehouse door before the frost came off the moor, and by Candlemas he had reached the word the carters laughed at. Nobody in Hallam Tor could say what wisdom looked like in stone, so he gave it a long looping tail that curled back on itself like a dog settling by the fire.

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In the thaw the north wall of the keep began to crack. A slab the size of a cart slid into the moat, and the steward wanted it rebuilt before the lambing. Tobias Reeve told him the wall was not his to mend, only the words above the door, so he carved courage slow and deep, the C hooked like a shepherd's crook, and walked the ramparts each dusk to see what the night had taken.

On the last evening of the thaw the steward's daughter, Ailsa, climbed up with a lantern and asked which stones he meant to keep. He pointed at the gap and said the river would have whatever it could reach, and the rest was only a question of where a man chose to stand. She asked whether that was the same as giving up. He said it was nearer to setting down a full bucket long enough to see the well.

By morning the wall had held where it could. Ailsa went up to find him gone to the coast with his chisels, and on the lintel, beneath the last line, she found two small words cut so fine she had to lean in close to read them, the difference, with a wren perched on the final stroke as if it had been there all along.