Close view of the back of a person's neck with three black Chinese characters tattooed vertically on the nape, in a lettering style.

Three Chinese characters down the nape

Lettering · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

Three bold black Chinese characters are stacked vertically down the centre of the nape of a person's neck. The strokes are solid black ink with smooth, even edges and no visible shading. The image is cropped to the upper back and neck, with dark hair pulled up on either side and skin tones dominating the background.

Lettering Neck Chinese character Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The third-floor window of the Corn Exchange clock tower was never locked, because nobody believed anyone would climb a wet drainpipe in February. You believed it. The rain came sideways off the Mersey, and the bells above you counted eleven, then eleven and a half, the way they always did when the mechanism was tired.

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Your partner Dilys waited below with the van lights off, speaking into a cheap radio that crackled every time a bus went by. "Mad," she said when you reached the ledge. "Fine. Mad thief. Get the ledger and come down before the night shift remembers its tea." The papers had given you a name they liked, the Madman of Mercer Street, though you had never once been mad, only careless with other people's rules.

Inside, the vault room smelled of brass polish and old paper. The ledger sat on a lectern, bound in green cloth, and beside it a glass case held a pocket watch stopped at the hour of some forgotten theft. You didn't take the watch. You opened the ledger instead and found, on the flyleaf, your grandmother's handwriting listing every debt the city owed her family. You laughed aloud, and the sound went up into the clock works like a startled bird.

When you came down the drainpipe the rain had stopped. Dilys was asleep with her head against the wheel. You slid the ledger under your coat, leaned on the van, and watched the first tram of the morning slide past, its windows lit gold and empty. Somewhere above you a bell rang twelve, and for once you were the one who knew what time it really was.