Black and grey lettering tattoo spelling BELIEVE in vertical capitals on the neck behind a person's ear.

Vertical BELIEVE lettering behind an ear

Lettering · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white close-up of the side of a head, showing an ear with a small earring and hair pulled back. The word BELIEVE is tattooed vertically in spaced capital letters on the skin behind the ear. The image is high contrast and grainy, with the lettering as the clear focal point against the soft hair.

Lettering Neck Believe Word Earring

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frost has got into the pump again, and you are kneeling on the concrete with a blowtorch you were told never to use indoors, when your brother's old letters catch your eye on the feed-store wall. Someone has stencilled them down the corrugated panel in tar-black capitals: B, E, L, I, E, V, E. Eight years of weather have lifted the edges, but the word still stands upright, one letter above the next, like a ladder nobody climbs.

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Your father painted it the spring before the flood took the lower field. He did it with a brush tied to a broom handle, standing on an upturned crate, and he never once explained it. When you asked, he said the cattle needed reminding and went back to mending the gate. You thought it was a joke for years. Now you hold the torch steady and let the flame shiver along the pipe while the wind comes off the moor and rattles the tin.

The pump catches at last with a cough. You stand, knees wet through, and step back to read the word the way a stranger would, top to bottom, the gaps between the letters opening like spaces in a fence. Believe. It is a plain instruction, the kind you would shout across a yard to someone already halfway to the gate.

You go inside, where the kettle is already warm, and you find the stencil brush in the drawer beside the twine. It still has his paint dried in its bristles. Outside, the light is going, and the word on the wall holds its shape a little longer than you do.