Small black lettering of the letter A tattooed at the nape of a woman's neck, above a pink satin dress with a jewelled neckline.

Small letter A tattoo at the nape of the neck

Lettering · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A close view of a woman's upper back and neck, showing a small black letter A tattooed at the nape. Her face is not visible, and the background is out of focus. The rest of the frame is taken up by a pale pink satin dress with a draped open back and a jewelled neckline.

Lettering Neck

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

The salt rains fell for seven years, and afterwards the weavers of Harrow Deep kept their looms in the drowned church, where the damp stopped thread from snapping. Old Mother Teasel had a daughter called Anwen who could judge the weight of cloth by listening to it. When the lord of the upper terraces sent word that his son needed a wedding gown by midsummer, Anwen was sent up the ladder with a spool of silver chain and a box of glass stones pulled from a sunken hotel.

Keep reading

She began with the neckline, because the old saying held that the collar carries a bride's name to the altar. She stitched the stones into a loop that opened like a cupped hand, then hung a heavy drop at its centre. The house-mark had to go at the nape, where the thread stopped. Her mother insisted it be an A, for abeyance, the old word for a promise kept waiting. Anwen sewed it in black so it would sit hidden under the hair.

The bride, Ysolde, thought the satin too plain at first. Cloth that poured like river water, she said, would never hold a crowd. But at the wedding, when she turned at the top of the steps, the lamplight caught the stones across her back and the whole hall fell silent. Her husband, who had been counting the guests, lost his count and never found it again.

Anwen was not invited up. She sat in the drowned church and listened to the bells carry across the water. Years later a carter brought a scrap of pink satin down the hill, and beneath the collar was a single black A, its thread still tight. Mother Teasel turned it over and said nothing, because the promise had been kept. Anwen took up her needle and began the next gown, leaving the last stitch loose, the way you do when you mean to come back.