Black and white photo of three lines of fine cursive script tattooed across a person's upper back near the shoulder blade.

Three lines of script across upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a person's upper back showing three lines of handwritten cursive lettering in black ink. The thin, even linework follows a slight downward slope across the skin, with the lines stacked evenly. The image is greyscale, with soft lighting and a dark background at the top right.

Lettering Fine line Back Script Handwriting Text

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 banners came off the lorry in Shrewsbury still folded like wet sheets, and Mo Haddow was already on his knees with a tin of size and a brush that had lost half its bristles. Forty years he had lettered the sideshows for Blackwood's Travelling Fair, and he could tell a fake hand from a real one across a field. The council man had asked for something new. Mo said the old letters were the new letters if you kept them straight.

Keep reading

I was sixteen and holding the chalk line for him that summer, the one season I was allowed near the paint. He worked along the canvas in pencil first, faint as breath, then wrote over it in black, never once lifting the brush to check. When I asked how he kept the slope so even, he said the trick was to lean into the cold and let the wrist do what the eye had no business doing.

The last board he painted was for the Ghost Train, a long strip that ran above the entrance. He wrote three lines across it and sent me to the far end where the lamps didn't reach. From there the letters sloped gently, like someone walking home tired, and I could read every word. Then the wind came up off the river, the tarpaulin cracked like a rifle, and the whole fair went dark for a minute.

When the generator caught again, the board was still there, the paint not yet dry. Mo was gone and the van had left for Telford, but beneath the last line, in pencil, he had written my name and a date four weeks ahead. I still have that board. I still think about his wrist.