Back of a person with a fine line black script tattoo of the word timshel on the upper back near the shoulder.

Timshel script on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph from behind of a person with their hair tied up, showing a single word tattooed in thin black script on the upper back, near the shoulder blade. The linework is fine and even, with a slight variation in stroke weight, and the ink is solid black with no shading. The skin is lightly toned against a pale, bright background, and the tattoo sits centrally in the frame.

Fine line Lettering Back Word Script

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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

Mind the stile, the left-hand step is rotten, and sit where the moss is dry, for I'm not telling this one standing. You've heard how the miller's boy went into the wood to pay off his father's debt, and how the wood took his boots and gave him back nothing but a cough. What you haven't heard is the word he came out with.

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The old women say the forest never gives orders. It leaves a choice lying on the path like a dropped coin and waits to see who bends for it. At the heart of the clearing there's a beech with its bark split open, and somebody long dead had cut a word into the grey wood, every letter run into the next as if the knife had been in a hurry. Timshel. The priest at Harrow Cross says it means thou shalt. The miller's boy read it thou mayest, and that one small difference was the whole of his life after.

He carried it home the way you'd carry a hot coal in a leaf. When his father shouted about the mill and the money and the ruined barley, the boy said the word under his breath until the shouting ran out of steam. He didn't pay the debt with gold, not in the end. He paid it by walking out of the house and not coming back until the old man had learned to fetch his own water.

If you go up there at dusk, the beech is still standing, and the cut is still in it, the letters gone soft and silver with age. Nobody has ever agreed on what it means. That's the trouble with a word that's been handed to you. You may read it however you can bear to.