Black stencil-style lettering reading USMC above SMEPER FI across the upper back, shown in a close photograph of bare skin.

USMC and Semper Fi lettering on upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of two lines of bold, block-capital lettering on the upper back, the top line reading USMC and the lower line reading SMEPER FI as it appears in the tattoo. The lettering uses solid black ink with a stencil-like, slightly uneven edge, and the second line is set at a slight angle across the shoulder blade area. The skin is warm yellow-toned and the background is out of focus, with the image framed tightly on the tattoo.

Lettering Back Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Pruett had the stencil card on the flour bench at ten to five, her palette knife still warm from the proving cabinet. Her nephew Tomasz had cut the letters the night before with a craft knife and a radio on low, and now the words sat there in the bulb light like a dropped spoon: USMC above, and below it, SMEPER FI. She read it twice, the way she read recipes she did not trust.

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The bags were for the veterans' breakfast on Saturday, forty of them, each to hold a split tin loaf and a twist of marmalade. The van left at six. The dough was already rising, and cardboard does not forgive a blunt blade. She could cut a new card, or she could stamp the bags as they were and let the error go out into the town on a Saturday morning.

Her brother Dennis had come home from the Corps with a jaw like a folded knife and very little talk. He collected his tin loaf every week and never once explained the words that people put on bags, mugs, bumper stickers. Once, reading the cardboard on the counter, he had only said that the men who got those words wrong usually meant them more than the ones who spelled them right.

She took the card to the back, inked the roller, and pressed it down hard on the first bag, then the second. The letters came out black and slightly ragged at the edges, crooked across the paper like a line of men who had not quite been told where to stand. She stacked them in rows by the door, counted forty, and wiped the ink from her thumb onto her apron. They would do.