Black and grey fine line script tattoo reading Strength on the back of a neck, with dark hair above it.

Strength script on the nape of the neck

Lettering · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A close view of the back of a neck showing the word Strength written in a flowing, cursive script in black ink. The linework is thin and even, with looped capitals and connected letters that sit just below the hairline. The skin tone is pale and the photograph is black and white, so the ink appears in greys and blacks against the surrounding skin.

Lettering Fine line Neck Strength Script Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The brush had already dipped twice before Ruth Calder noticed the bargee's wife was watching her hand rather than the board. "Join them up," Nell said. "Don't let the letters go off on their own. The water gets in the gaps."

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The boat was the Patience, low in the water at Sowerby Bridge, and the name was to go on the cabin side in gold leaf over black. Her husband had drowned at the lock in March, Nell said, and the boat would be sold to a man from Leeds unless it looked cared for. She wanted one word beneath the name, not the name itself. "Strength," she said. "Not for me. For the boy."

Ruth drew the S first with a long tail that swept back under the rest, the way her old master had taught her, then the t, the r, and so on, each stroke rolling into the next so the word could not come apart. The h at the end she looped high, and the last lift of the stroke she let trail off the edge of the board like a rope paying out from a bollard.

When the lettering had dried, Nell ran a thumb along the loop and said nothing for a while. The boy, eight years old and smelling of coal smoke, leaned out of the hatch to look. "It doesn't stop," he said. Ruth thought that was the nearest thing to a verdict she was going to get, and she packed her brushes.