Black lettering tattoo reading eyeballs to entrails next to an open swirling heart outline on the upper back.

Swirling heart and script quote on upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black script phrase, eyeballs to entrails, runs across the skin beside a large swirling heart outline made of a single line that curls into a point at the lower left. The linework is smooth and uniform in black ink with no shading, and the skin tone is light with a few freckles. The tattoo sits centred in the frame over the shoulder blade area, with the phrase running diagonally upward to the right.

Lettering Back Heart Script Quote Word

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

Mrs Harriet Pell had sold offal from the same tiled stall at Kirkgate Market for thirty-one years, and she kept the price board in her own copperplate. Eyeballs to entrails, it said, in letters a child could read from the bus shelter, with a looping heart drawn beneath it in one unbroken line because the council inspector had told her a shop needed some warmth to it.

Keep reading

Her nephew Danny thought the sign was morbid. He said so every Saturday while he scraped the marble, and every Saturday she told him that folk came for the lambs' kidneys and ox tongue because the stall was honest about what it sold. Nobody bought a pig's trotter for pretty words, she said, but they liked to be told the truth about it first.

The trouble came in March, when the wholesaler changed the delivery day and the Saturday trade dried to nothing. Danny wanted to take the board down and put up a sign for pasties. Harriet stood on the step with her arms folded and said the heart stayed where it was. She had written it the year her husband stood beside her at the block, and she would not be talked out of a line of script by a lad who thought entrails were a bad joke.

The next Saturday a woman stopped in the rain, read the board twice and laughed so hard she had to lean on the fish counter. She bought four pounds of liver for her father's birthday tea and said he would want it cooked with onions, the way he'd always had it. Harriet wrapped it in greaseproof, took the coins, and left the heart where it was.