Black lettering tattoo of four vertical characters on the back of a neck, with a hand resting on the nape below brown hair.

Vertical characters tattoo on the back of neck

Lettering · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A close view of the back of a neck with four vertical black characters in a brush-like script, running from the hairline downwards. The strokes are solid black with no shading, set against pale skin. A hand rests on the nape at the lower left, and the background is dark.

Lettering Neck Character Script Neck Hair

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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

The ledger wanted the name in characters, so I sat under the lamp with the brush and the list the ministry had sent down from the capital, trying to make a foreign boy's name fit inside four squares. Most names fought me. Smith came out as a tired little bow. But the name on Thursday's form was Elias, and the sound of it opened like a door. I gave it 埃 for the dust that rises off a road, 利 for something sharp that also pays, 亚 for the second of anything, and 斯 because it looked to me like a load carried on one shoulder.

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He came to my window the next morning with rain still in his collar. He read the sheet upside down, the way people do when they are trying to find themselves in a document, and asked what the characters meant. I told him the truth, that they meant nothing at all, only the sounds of his name borrowed and bent to fit the ledger. He frowned as if I had cheated him out of a gift. Then he asked whether I could write it again, but going down the page rather than across, because that was how his grandmother had written her own name on the back of a photograph.

The ledger has no column for that. I wrote it anyway, one stroke sitting beneath the last, the ink thick at the top and thinning as my wrist lifted. When I passed the sheet back, he folded it once and slid it into his coat without looking at the stamp. Behind him the queue had grown to the door, and the next man was already holding out his passport, so I took it, opened it to the photograph, and began to find the characters for his name.