Black fine script lettering tattoo across the upper back, two lines of flourished text running over the shoulder blades.

Two lines of script quote across upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

Two lines of cursive script with looping flourishes run across the upper back, one line on each side of the spine. The left line reads in part as a quotation about being the change you want to see, and the right line is partly legible as a quotation about an eye for an eye. The linework is crisp and solid black on a light, even skin tone, and the photo is taken straight on from behind, with the subject's shoulders and back filling the frame.

Lettering Back Quote Script Text Flourish Swirl

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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

The ink had not dried when the Duke's rider came down the Lowmarsh road, so I blotted the page with my sleeve and began again on a clean sheet. Three villages had burned that spring, and each burning was answered by another, a barn for a barn, a well for a well, until nobody in the valley could say who had struck the first match. My master wanted the peace written in the old round hand, the kind the crown used for treaties nobody meant to keep. I wrote it in my own slanted hand instead, the one my mother taught me, with loops she said were only for show.

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The rider waited while I worked. He was a boy no older than my nephew Tam, and he kept rubbing the scar on his thumb. He asked why I bothered with flourishes when the message was plain. I told him plain words were what the feud had been built on, and that a loop takes longer to draw than a stab, so a man has time to lift his pen and think. I wrote the line about the change a man wishes to see in the world, and the boy said it sounded like a preacher's sentence. I said it sounded like a farmer's job, and that farmers did not get to skip the first furrow.

The reeve read the letter aloud at the crossroads, and nobody cheered. The next morning, though, a new bucket hung on the rope at Pell's Ford well, and a stray cow was found grazing in its own field. The reply came back a fortnight later. It had no flourishes at all, only square capitals pressed hard enough to tear the paper, and at the bottom, in a child's wobbling hand, someone had added a loop to the final letter. I pinned it beside my desk and have looked at it every morning since.