Close-up of a black fine line lettering tattoo on a woman's upper back, with the names Lance and Autumn each written inside a heart shape near the shoulder blade.

Two names in heart script on upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows two words written in flowing script, each enclosed in an open heart outline, with one placed above the other. The linework is thin and even, and the ink is solid black with no shading or colour. It sits on the upper back near the shoulder blade, photographed from behind against soft skin tones and a blurred background.

Lettering Back Heart Name Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The council wanted the stairwell on the ninth floor of Gresley House scrubbed clean before the inspectors came, but Ruth Okafor had other ideas about the graffiti beside the bin chute. Two names sat in hearts on the breeze-block wall, Lance above Autumn, the letters swollen and curling as if someone had written them with a bicycle chain. Nobody had painted over them in thirty years. Ruth climbed the stairs with her sign-writer's brushes wrapped in a tea towel, the lift having been out since Tuesday.

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She had been a letterer for longer than she had been a widow, and she knew a heart could be drawn in one clean sweep if you trusted the wrist. She laid out the first heart in pencil, then the second, leaving room for the damp stain that crept up from the drain. Below her a pram rattled over the concrete and a radio played the shipping forecast through an open door. A boy on the landing asked what she was doing. 'Tidying up after some lovers,' she said, and he looked at her as though she had told him the building was haunted.

The old script was hard to match. Whoever had carved it had pressed too hard and lost nerve at the tails of the L and the second u. Ruth kept the wobble. She made Autumn's final letter loop back under its heart the way the original did, so the word seemed to lean on the one above it.

When she finished, the wall looked newer and older at once. She packed her brushes, stepped back to the window, and saw the two hearts stacked against the grey car park like a pair of lanterns someone had forgotten to light. The caretaker came up that evening, read the names, and said nothing about the council. He only switched off the landing light and left her to watch them dry.