Small black Chinese characters tattooed in a vertical column between the shoulder blades on a woman's upper back, in a lettering style.

Vertical Chinese characters across upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with her dark hair in a low bun is seen from behind, wearing a pale blue open-back dress with thin straps. Three small black Chinese characters are stacked vertically between her shoulder blades, drawn in fine, even strokes. The ink is dark grey-black against warm skin, with a soft, blurred background and a second figure partly out of focus at the left edge.

Lettering Back Chinese character Script Back tattoo Woman

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Master Liu made me grind ink for a whole month before he let me touch a brush to anything that would be sold. The stone had to be cold, the water measured by eye, and the pine soot worked until it gave off no grit. I did it without complaint, mostly because the market women came to our stall by the Western Gate and watched me through the morning, and they liked a boy who did not chatter.

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The commission came in autumn from a dyer's widow who wanted three characters for her daughter, who was leaving with a salt merchant for the coast. She did not want them large. The girl would carry them where strangers could not read them unless she chose to show them, so they must be small, plain and clean enough for a grandmother to make out by lamplight. Master Liu gave the work to me. I had written those characters a thousand times on practice boards, but never one meant to travel.

I wrote them three times on rice paper before the widow nodded at the third. Then I cut a fine silk stencil and pressed the ink through a strip of soft leather the daughter would sew into her travelling coat. The lines came out even, and when I lifted the silk the three characters sat on the leather like small birds on a wire.

The salt boat left at dawn. Some months later a letter reached our stall, folded tight, with no name at the foot, only a single line asking whether the ink would hold through sea water. I did not know. I wrote back that I had ground it myself, slowly, and that it would hold for as long as the leather did, and then I went out to the well and drew a bucket, just to see how long the water took to stop shivering.