Close-up of a black lettering tattoo on skin reading "Where words fail, music speaks." in a simple typeface.

Text tattoo reading Where words fail, music speaks

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo is a two-line quotation, "Where words fail, music speaks.", set in a clean black typeface with a small ellipsis after "fail". The lettering is crisp and solid black with no shading, set on pale skin with fine body hairs visible. The text fills most of the frame, with the line break placed after "fail," and the background is softly out of focus.

Lettering Other Quote Text Word Music Lettering

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

The snow had sealed the lane above Hebden by four o'clock, so Mrs Ruddock gave the commercial traveller the room over the bar and me the job of carrying up his coal. I was sixteen and had no business being curious, but the man had a brass-cornered case that rattled when he set it down, and it was the wrong size for samples.

Keep reading

He came down at nine with the case open on his arm. Inside, nested in green baize, was a concertina with mother-of-pearl buttons gone the colour of weak tea. He asked whether the piano in the snug still had all its keys. It had eighty-eight, but the B flat above middle C had been dead since my grandfather dropped a tankard on it in 1931.

He played it anyway, badly at first, then with a sort of patience that made the regulars stop talking. Nobody asked his name. Words had got very short that winter, the way they do when the road is shut and the wireless is wrong. Mrs Ruddock wiped the same glass for ten minutes and never once looked up.

When he finished he closed the case, paid for his supper in old coins, and left before the thaw could take the road back. Pinned under the snug's lamp he had left a sheet of manuscript paper with one bar written on it, and beneath the bar, in soft pencil, the words where words fail. I kept it in my apron pocket for thirty years and never once found the rest of the tune.