Black serif lettering reading Words, are our most inexhaustible source of magic, tattooed in a fine line lettering style across the upper back.

Serif quote tattoo on upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo is a single line of black serif lettering set in two lines, reading Words, are our most inexhaustible source of magic. The letterforms are crisp and evenly weighted, with solid black ink and soft grey shading at the edges of the strokes. The text sits centred on plain, pale skin, with a shallow depth of field softening the background.

Lettering Back Quote Text Word

Find an artist for this

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

By the time the 6.12 pulled out of Ashby Parva, Dennis Marr had already decided the paperback on the bench was worth keeping. Nobody came back for books. Umbrellas, gloves, a lead for a dog that never turned up, those people wanted back. Books were what people chose to leave behind, and that told him something about them.

Keep reading

He opened it in the cold little office behind the ticket hall, with the radiator ticking and the kettle not yet on. The fly leaf had been pencilled with a column of dates, and beside a passage about a lighthouse keeper someone had underlined a single line twice: Words, are our most inexhaustible source of magic. The handwriting leaned forward, as though it had been written on a moving train, which, he supposed, it had.

He wrote the details on a card and pinned it to the board. Three weeks passed. Then a woman telephoned from Leeds, asked him to read the lighthouse line out loud, and went quiet for so long he thought the line had dropped. She said she had left the book on purpose, on the bench, for whoever sat down next. She had been going to see her sister, who had stopped answering letters, and she had wanted to give the words somewhere to go.

Dennis put the phone down and looked at the shelf of umbrellas. Then he took the paperback to the window, where the platform lamps were coming on one by one, and read the underlined line again, slower this time, the way you would read a set of directions for a journey you had not yet decided to make.