Fine line black script lettering on the upper back of a woman with her blonde hair in a bun, wearing a white top with a low scoop back.

Small script lettering on upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph taken from behind of a woman with blonde hair in a loose bun, wearing a white top with a low scoop back. A small black cursive script word sits on the upper back, close to the spine and below the shoulder blades. The linework is thin and even, the skin is evenly lit, and the tattoo is set off by the white fabric and the blurred background.

Lettering Fine line Back Script Word Lettering Upper 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

Old Mags Penhallow kept the light on Scarrow Head for thirty-one winters, and in all that time she never once let the lamp tip. The brass clockwork that turned the great lens had to be wound every four hours, and the sea below had its own ideas about balance. Her husband Joss had drowned off the reef the year they built the new stair, so she did the winding herself, with a bucket of sand hung on each side of the frame to keep the weight true.

Keep reading

The autumn the drowned bell began ringing, the sea came up the cliff like a grey animal. Every boat in Porthgwidden stayed in harbour. Ned Carne, a boy of nineteen, rowed out anyway after his brother's dinghy. Mags climbed the tower through the night, winding and rewinding until her arms shook, and when the lamp began to lurch she shouted down the speaking tube for someone to bring sand. Nobody came. The buckets were empty, and the sand had washed off the stairs in the first gale.

So she did what she could. She took off her shawl, filled it with pebbles from the lamp-room floor, and hung it from the bracket opposite the sand-hook, and the lamp steadied. Ned saw the beam hold still through the spray and steered by it, though a light that did not sway was not what the sea expected. At dawn he came up the cliff path with the dinghy's rope over his shoulder and found her asleep against the lens, one hand still on the crank.

Mags never told anyone how she had kept the lamp level. Above the door she had cut a single word into the lintel, neat as a stitch: equilibrium. The keepers after her said it under their breath each time they wound the clock, the way you repeat a prayer you only half learned, and none of them ever found the pebbles on the sill to be anything but ordinary.