Black and white photo of a bare upper back with a vertical column of black Asian-style characters and a small eye motif, in lettering style on the back.

Vertical characters on a upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph taken from behind shows a bare back with long dark hair pulled up by both hands. A vertical column of black, East Asian-style characters runs down the upper back near the neck, with a small eye-like motif beside it near the left shoulder blade. The ink is solid and crisp, and the soft grey tones of the photograph and plain background keep the focus on the tattoo.

Lettering Back Character Script Eye Spine Hair

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ink was never meant to dry on the wall. Oswin Mared had been told as much by the abbess of the Glass Stair, who handed him the brush at the foot of the bell tower and said the column must run from the lowest step to the lantern without a single break. Each character was a word the kingdom had lost. He had already spent three winters on the first six, and his knuckles had gone white with cold every morning of them.

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On the seventh morning a fog came off the harbour thick enough to swallow the gulls, and he could not see past his own elbow. He worked by memory and by the small round lens his father had ground from sea glass, which he wore on a cord and held to one eye whenever the light turned strange. Through it the strokes sharpened into hard black edges, crisp as frost on a shutter, and he could read the word he had just written. It was "tide", and the next one, half finished, was "return".

Abbess Liese climbed the stairs with a lantern at noon, though the fog had not lifted. She looked at the seventh character for a long time and said it was the word the old kings had buried under the harbour wall, the one that meant the thing you do when you look back at the sea and the sea looks back. Oswin asked her why it had to be written now. She only held out her hand for the brush.

He took it back and finished the stroke himself. When the last line was dry the fog thinned and the lantern at the top of the column caught the first sun in forty years. Far below, the bell gave one slow note, though nobody had touched the rope.