Black and grey photo of a small, fine line angular lettering tattoo on the side of a person's back, below the shoulder blade, with the head turned away.

Small angular lettering on the side of the back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey photograph shows a small tattoo on the side of a person's back, below the shoulder blade, with the face turned away and out of frame. The tattoo is made of thin, angular characters, including a G-shaped form, a chevron and a V-like stroke, drawn in clean black linework with no shading. The soft, neutral lighting and plain background keep the focus on the small, simple design.

Fine line Lettering Geometric Back Lettering Chevron Small tattoo Back

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

Mrs Penhallow kept the slate by the scullery door, and on it she chalked the tides for her lodgers, because the printed tables at the station were wrong by a quarter hour and nobody trusted a clock that had come from London. Each morning she wrote the same thing in the same hand: a G for the ground, a chevron for the water going out, a peak for the water coming in, and a V where the two met and went quiet.

Keep reading

Young Tomas Vell came in October with a suitcase full of books and a face like a shut door. He read the slate every morning and asked what the signs meant, and every morning she told him the sea was the sea and the land was the land, and that neither was greater than the other, which he did not believe. He sat on the harbour wall with his notebook and argued with the gulls.

On the last Saturday of the month the spring tide came in higher than anyone remembered and took the bottom step of the boarding house garden. Tomas went down to the wall at dusk to watch it and found Mrs Penhallow already there, a lantern in one hand, rubbing the chalk off the slate with her thumb and writing a single line again: the greater sign, pointing down at the low water mark, and nothing after it.

'Which is greater?' he asked. She said the water always came back, and that was the only thing a person needed to know about it. He wrote the sign in his notebook, rubbed it out, then wrote it again, smaller, in the corner where nobody would see, and went in to bed.