Black and grey script lettering reading two lines of verse across a person's upper back, over the shoulder blade area.

Two lines of script lettering across upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

Two lines of cursive script lettering run across the upper back, with the words set in a flowing, slanted hand. The linework is solid black ink with some soft shading on the letterforms, and the image is in black and white, with the skin lit from the centre and falling into shadow at the top left. The composition is close and horizontal, with the text filling most of the frame.

Lettering Back Script Quote Text Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Bed nine had been a sign-writer for forty years, and at three in the morning he still wanted the lettering right. I came in to check his line and found him with one hand out from under the blanket, tracing letters on the air with a finger, backwards, so that I could read them off the ceiling tiles. He said he was doing the shopfront on Cable Street again, the one with the gilt that never sat true.

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He told me the trick with a script was never to lift the brush until the stroke was finished. Lift too early and the whole word goes limp, like a man who has decided to sit down. He had painted funeral parlours and chemists and a dozen pubs, and he said the hardest word he ever did was "gentle", because it looked like it was giving up before it had started. I asked him what he'd have painted instead. He thought about it for so long the drip beside him clicked twice. "Something with a long tail on it," he said. "Something that doesn't want to go."

Then the monitor began to chirp and his breathing went shallow and quick, and he gripped my wrist hard enough to leave marks. He wanted the lamp on. He wanted to see the glass. I switched on the little reading light above the bed and held his hand steady over the sheet, and he drew the last long loop of a capital in the air above my fingers, slowly, the way you'd finish a word nobody else could read. By six the window had gone from black to the colour of weak tea. He let his hand fall flat on the blanket, still shaping a letter I could not see, and I sat with him a while longer in the grey light, not quite sure which of us was holding the brush.