Black and grey lettering tattoo of a tree built from lines of quoted text, covering the upper back.

Text tree of quotes across the back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large tattoo across the upper back forms a tree whose trunk and branches are made of lines of handwritten and typeset text. The lettering varies in size and typeface, with the trunk in bold capitals and the smaller quotes arranged in branch and heart-shaped clusters. The ink is solid black on pale skin, with a plain, evenly lit composition that shows the whole piece.

Lettering Back Tree Text Quote Heart Lettering Back piece

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now then, pull that chair nearer, because the wind off the front comes straight through the sash and I'll not shout this twice. The Marine House had nine rooms and a landlady called Mrs Pardoe who kept every scrap of paper that ever came through the letterbox. She said a boarding house was just a hotel that had given up on being respectable. Her lodger that winter was a clerk from Leeds named Walter Finch, who wrote to a woman in Whitby every night and never posted a single one.

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He left them in the bureau, tied with string that had once been fishing line. Mrs Pardoe read them all, which I'll not defend. They were full of small things. Did my heart love till now, he'd written, then crossed it out and wrote it again in better ink. He told her she had the sweetest face on the cliff path, and that the sea looked like all his dreams when she was in it. He could not say the word love without apologising for it first.

In February the Whitby address came back stamped return to sender. Walter sat at the kitchen table with the bundle in his lap and said the thing Mrs Pardoe never forgot. Fear, he said, is the only thing I ever learned to love, and I learned it too late to say so. She put the kettle on and let him talk until the window went grey.

The letters went into the range that spring, all but one. Mrs Pardoe kept the last one folded in her apron pocket, and when people ask why she never sold the house, she taps the pocket and says love isn't how you feel, it's what you do, and he did nothing at all. Pass the milk, love, and mind the draught.