Woman seen from behind with a small black script tattoo reading 'a love supreme' on her upper back, hair in a bun, city balcony behind her.

Small script phrase on upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman is photographed from behind, showing a small black script tattoo that reads 'a love supreme' high on the upper back below the nape. The lettering is fine and neat with even, solid ink and no shading. The image is mostly warm skin tones and a black strappy bra, set against a sunny high-rise city view from a balcony.

Lettering Fine line Back Script Lettering Phrase Hair bun

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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

Mind the lamp, it smokes when the wind comes round, and you'll want your coat, for the Marguerite Vane never warmed a passenger in her life. Sit. The gramophone rode in the mate's locker from Valparaiso onward, wrapped in oilcloth like a bad conscience. Nobody touched it. It belonged to Ada Penhallow, the purser's wife, who went home to Penzance at Montevideo and left it behind with a crate of records she never unpacked.

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Four records were in that crate, and only one had a sleeve with a man's face on it, a tall fellow with his eyes shut and his saxophone held like a hymn book. The purser's boy, Tom Gilly, was sixteen and sick of salt pork, so one night in the doldrums he cranked the thing up and set the needle down. The first part went on longer than any shanty we knew. Nobody swore at him. Men stood on the forecastle with their pipes gone out and their hands hanging useless at their sides.

The turn came with the last side, the one called Psalm. Tom had been told it was the hymn, the sort of thing you play at a wake. He said afterwards the notes kept climbing the way a man climbs the ratlines in a gale, slow and certain, not once looking down. The captain came up in his nightshirt, and instead of ordering the thing stopped, he sat on the hatch cover and stayed until the needle ran out into the silence at the label.

Ada never sent for the crate. When the ship was broken up at Hull, the boy carried the sleeve off inside his coat. Years later he had the title cut into a brass plate for his mantel and told anyone who asked that it was only the name of a record. It was never only the name of a record, and that is all the sense I can make of it.