Black and grey serif lettering of a song lyric across the side of the torso above denim jeans, a lettering tattoo.

Song lyric lettering across the side

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a black and grey tattoo of several lines of serif lettering, set in a slightly diagonal block across the side of the torso. The letters are crisp, solid black with soft grey shading at the edges, and the text sits on a light skin tone against blue denim and a floral top. The framing is tight and shallow, keeping the lettering as the clear focus.

Lettering Other Lyric Text Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Carlton Rooms in Sowerby smelled of Brylcreem and wet wool, and Ruth Ashworth had only come because her sister dared her. She stayed because of Danny Mott, who could not dance and did not pretend otherwise. Between numbers he sat on the edge of the stage and copied the band's slow song onto the back of a beer mat, in square capitals that leaned like fence posts in a gale. She took the pen off him and rewrote the line in a proper serif, the way she'd been taught at the print works in Hebden, where she had set type by hand since she was fifteen. He laughed and asked whether she could set his name in lead. She could, and did, the next Monday, with a pinch of her own ink on the wrong side of the stick.

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By the spring they were talking about a house with a yard that flooded. Danny said he would follow her anywhere, that together they could make a heaven out of the mill-town hell they'd been born into, and he said it so easily that she believed him. He also said, half joking, that if she ever left him he'd rather go by her hand than by anyone else's. She laughed then. She didn't laugh later, when she understood how close a promise could sit to a threat when a man was drinking.

The wedding order came in on a Thursday, a card to be printed in black. Ruth locked the forme herself, reading each letter backwards in the stick, and she set the words the bride had chosen, a plain line about staying put. Her thumb was grey with ink when she finished. She wiped it on her apron, then pulled a proof, and the letters came up clean and the right way round.