Small black fine line lettering tattoo on the back of a neck, with hair pulled up and a blue checked shirt visible.

Small lettering on the back of the neck

Lettering · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A person seen from behind, with hair pulled up and held by one hand, shows a small black tattoo of angular characters on the back of the neck. The linework is thin and solid, with no shading, and the ink is black against the skin. The background shows a car interior and side mirror, with the subject filling the centre of the frame.

Lettering Fine line Neck Letter Character Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The third lodger that winter would not come down from the attic until the tide had turned twice, so Nan Ostle carried his supper up herself and left it outside the door. Scarrow Point had taken in widows, drovers and once a man who taught gulls to fetch, but never a guest who wrote on himself. He sat under the skylight with a tin of ink and a bone needle, pricking three angular marks where his collar met his hair. He said his mother had carved the same letters on the boat shed lintel in Holm, and that a person could not drown while they were written down somewhere, even on a neck.

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Nan had no quarrel with ink. What she minded was the sea coming up the lane on spring nights and knocking at the back door like a neighbour who had forgotten the hour. On the fourth night the knocking stopped, and she found the attic empty, the window open, and the three marks cut into the sill in strokes as thin as the ones on his neck. Down in the harbour a bell was ringing for a boat that had not gone out.

Her husband had lost the Gannet Ruth forty years before, her name painted in pale red on the stern. Nan took a lamp down to the shore and found the lodger standing knee-deep, his hair tied back with sailcloth, one hand lifted as if to hail someone past the breakers. She did not call him in. She waded out and read the marks aloud, backwards, the way the old folk read a headstone, until the water drew off the bay and left the sand bright and empty.

In the morning his room was swept and the rent paid in full, in harbour-green coins. Beneath the last entry in the ledger was a new name in those angular letters, and beside it Nan made a small dry tick. Lodgers came and went at Scarrow Point. That one she never let go of, and when the spring tides climbed the lane she left the back door on the latch.