Back view of a woman with a long blonde braid and a white crochet top, showing a small black script tattoo between her shoulder blades.

Small script tattoo on upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with curly blonde hair in a long side braid sits with her back to the camera, wearing a white crochet top. A small black script tattoo sits on her upper back, between the shoulder blades, and its lines are fine and crisp. The image is warm toned, with a wooden boat edge, rope and green water behind her.

Lettering Back Script Tattoo Braid Blonde hair Boat Rope Water

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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

Nell Harrow found the envelope wedged under the chandlery ledger, addressed in her father's cramped hand to a name nobody in Porthgarrow had used for twenty years. She turned it over twice before breaking the wax, because the boats were coming in and the fish would not sort themselves, and because she already knew what kind of letter a man writes when he has been at sea too long.

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Inside, the ink had bled where a wet thumb had pressed. It was short. He wrote of a mooring line he had tied at a quay in Lisbon, of a cook who sang hymns in the wrong key, and of a clock he had repaired for a widow in Cadiz who paid him in oranges. At the bottom, in the smaller script he kept for things he did not want to shout, he had written that the tide tables were wrong by twelve minutes and that he had stopped correcting them.

Nell went down to the slip with the letter in her apron pocket and found Tomas Veeder hauling a crab pot onto the stones. She asked him about the Marguerite, the coaster that had gone out in March and not come back, and he said nothing for a long time. Then he pointed at the rope coiled on the bollard, the same knot her father used. "He tied that the night before," Tomas said. "Said he'd be back for the spring tides."

She read the last line again, the one about the sun always rising somewhere else, and understood it was not a promise but a direction. The next morning she cast off the skiff herself, with the tide running west and twelve minutes early, and did not look back at the harbour wall until the water had turned green around her.