Black lettering tattoo of three Chinese characters in a vertical line down the upper back of a person with blonde hair pulled over one shoulder.

Three Chinese characters down the upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph from behind shows three black Chinese characters stacked vertically along the centre of the upper back, just below the nape of the neck. The characters have bold, even strokes with slightly softened edges, and the ink is a uniform dark grey-black against pale skin. The plain, out-of-focus background and soft lighting keep the attention on the lettering.

Lettering Back Chinese character Script Text Back

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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 capsule came up out of the silt below the old barrage in the wet season, its lid sealed with wax gone the colour of weak tea. Inside there was no letter, only three marks cut into the underside of the lid, stacked one above the other as if whoever made them wanted them read from the top down. Nobody at the Lowmoor Archive could make them out, so Halle sent me the rubbing, because I was the one who had kept the old character tables when the rest of the building went over to pictograms.

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It took me nine nights with a lamp and a cracked glossary. The first mark was love, or the feeling that sits just before a word for love. The second meant health, or ease, or the kind of plenty that means a roof and a full pot. The third was peace, a level stroke with one short leg, flat as a ruled line in a ledger. Read together they were a blessing, the sort you press on a child's forehead before she walks to school. The wax still held a thumbprint so small that the gauge put it at a girl of about twelve.

Halle wanted the rest of the story: who she was, which sea had taken her town, whether she lived to be old. I told her the marks didn't say. The archive keeps the words and leaves the hand alone, and that rule has kept us out of trouble for forty years. I checked the ration ledgers for that year anyway, and found a clerk who had signed off a boat to the north coast with the same three strokes in the margin, beside a name and nothing else.

I sent the rubbing back down the wire to the coast crew with a note to dig nearer the old pier. Then I copied the three characters onto a scrap of card and tucked it into the pocket of my coat, so that whoever opens the next box will find something kind waiting for them.