Woman seen from behind on a beach with two solid black quotation mark tattoos, one either side of her upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two quotation marks on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman is photographed from behind on a sandy beach, with two bold, solid black quotation mark tattoos sitting on her upper back, one on each side of the spine. The ink is clean-edged and fully black with no shading or colour. Her red sunglasses, a black and white polka dot neck tie and blurred sunbathers in the background fill the rest of the frame.

Back Beach Sunglasses Polka dot Sand

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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

Now you'll be wanting the words exact, so I'll give them to you the way old Ada Pryce gave them to me over the orchard wall that September. She had been picking Discovery apples since first light, and her back was bent like a hook, but she straightened up for the surveyor's boy and said, “These trees were planted by my grandfather and they will come out of this ground only when the wind takes them.” The boy went red to his ears and walked back down the lane without his hat.

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That's the version that went round the village pub for forty years, and I'll admit I polished it myself. Each winter I added a branch or two, the way you'd prune a story to make it bear. Ada laughed when I told it to her face. She said the words had been hers, but she had never once used the word wind, and as for grandfather, he was a bad-tempered man who sold the top field for a motorbike. The surveyor's boy had only asked her whether the wasps were a nuisance.

So what did she say? She looked at the windfalls going soft in the long grass, and she said, “Mind the wasps, they're drunk on the sweet ones.” Then she pressed a bruised apple into my hand, and I have carried that small true sentence ever since, quoted in my own voice, with the marks round it like two little hands holding a lid shut on a jar.