Two photographs of a woman in a black strappy swimsuit by a pool, with a small dark tattoo on her mid back visible in the right-hand image.

Small back tattoo beside a black strappy swimsuit

Back · Black and grey · Photo

The left panel shows a woman from the waist down, with her head cropped out of frame, wearing a black one-piece swimsuit with strappy cut-outs at the sides. The right panel shows her back as she lies on a pale surface beside a blue pool, with a small dark tattoo of fine lettering or script on the upper back. The tattoo is too small and low resolution to read or assess its linework, and the image is mainly a swimwear shot.

Back Tattoo Script

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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

Harriet had been lettering names on barges for thirty years, and she still wet her brush on her tongue when she was nervous. The job on the Lea was small: a single line of script on the transom of the Corncrake, a name her client wanted in gold leaf and no bigger than a thumbnail. "Smaller," he kept saying, leaning over the gunwale with a mug of tea going cold in his hand. "Nobody's supposed to read it from the towpath."

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She worked through the morning with a rigger brush and a magnifier pushed up on her forehead. The letters were the old copperplate her father had taught her, the loops tight enough that the gold would hold the light. Each downstroke pulled a thread of paint across the wood. Halfway through the second word a moorhen walked along the bank and stopped to watch her, and she found herself talking to it about the weather.

When she finished, the client climbed down and held the name up to the sun, squinting. He did not say it was beautiful. He said, "That's my mother's maiden name," and then nothing for a long while, while the water slapped the hull.

Harriet packed her brushes into the leather roll and didn't ask. Some lettering was for the people who read it, and some was for the one who needed to know it was there. She walked back along the towpath with gold dust on her cuffs, and the river kept moving under the barges as if nothing had been written at all.