Close view of black lettering reading Hier kommt die Sonne in a blackletter style across the back of a woman's neck.

Two-line lettering on the back of the neck

Lettering · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

The photo shows the back of a woman's neck and upper shoulders, with her hair held up by a hand on the left. The tattoo is a two-line phrase in a blackletter-style script, reading Hier kommt die Sonne, in solid black ink with crisp edges. The dark background and dark top keep the focus on the lettering, which is centred on the neck.

Lettering Neck Text Script Phrase Sun

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift has been dead since Tuesday, so you carry the paint up the stairs one tin at a time, nine floors of concrete that smell of damp and somebody's fried onions. Mrs Okafor on the fourth is arguing with a radio about the weather. Nobody on Ferndale House asks what colour you're using. They only ask when it will be finished, and you have stopped having a good answer.

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The council wants the stairwell in magnolia because the walls have been scrawled so thick with names and phone numbers that the building reads like a ledger of people who gave up on being found. You plan to cover all of it in one long Saturday. Then, on the ninth floor, behind a fire door propped open with a brick, you find a line in careful black letters that you can't quite read at first: Hier kommt die Sonne. Your grandmother used to sing something like it over the washing-up in Hamburg, long before her English got better than her songs.

You stand there with the roller dripping onto your boots. The lettering is good, the blackletter sharp at every corner, and someone took real trouble. The next week you find the author, a boy of about twelve on the balcony with a marker pen, who tells you his mum works nights at the laundry and the flat is always dark when she leaves it. He says the sun is the only thing she never forgets to bring home. You don't paint over it.

Instead you buy a tin of yellow and do the stairwell in pale butter, one landing at a time, leaving the ninth floor exactly as it was. By April the building glows like a pat of butter left on a warm sill, and the black words stay where they were, the one dark line the morning light finds first.