Sketchy black and red linework tattoo of three faces on a man's upper back, with vertical lettering running down the left side of the spine.

Three faces and vertical lettering on a back

Lettering · Back · Mixed · Photo

A man is photographed from behind, showing a tattoo of three male faces drawn in loose, sketchy linework across the upper back. The faces are shaded in grey and black with some reddish lines, and sit beside a rough, textured outline of a landscape or shoulders. A column of short lowercase words and fragments runs vertically down the left side of the back.

Lettering Back Face Portrait Lettering Text Man

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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

You reach the Gallows Flat turn-off at dusk with the petrol needle resting on empty and the last sign before the mountain leaning over the road. Someone has painted letters down a fence post in tar: I, then a gap, then le, af, fa, ll, one, imes. You read them aloud to the empty car because nobody else is there to correct you.

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The mountain is three faces cut into grey rock, each turned a little toward the road as if waiting for a bus. The first wears a beard of scree, the second has a crack for a mouth, and the third squints as though he has heard about your car. Teodor, who keeps the pump, says the carver ran out of money halfway through the third chin and kept chiselling anyway, out of spite.

Teodor sells you a can of fuel at a price that is clearly a joke, then asks whether you have read the fence. You say yes. He says that is the trouble, because everyone reads it across and nobody reads it down. Read it down, he says, and it tells you the thing the carver never managed to say to the mountain's face.

You drive back in the last blue light and read the column the way you would read a tally, one fragment at a time. The words come up out of the broken letters like stones out of sand: a plain sentence telling you to keep going, and beneath it a small chisel mark where a name should be. You switch the headlights off and sit there until the three faces dissolve into the dark.