Black and white photo of a bare back with a thin vertical line of cursive script tattoo running down the spine.

Vertical cursive script down the spine

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman's bare back is shown from behind, with a long vertical line of cursive script tattooed along the spine from the shoulder blades up towards the neck. The thin, even linework is dark grey or black against the skin, and the lettering is only partly legible in the photo. The soft monochrome lighting and the dark top at the left edge frame the tattoo as the main focus.

Lettering Back Script Lettering Spine Cursive

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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

Nell had copied the same line forty times before the lamp guttered, and still the ink would not sit right. The letter lay under the glass of the reading room at the Lantern Street sorting office, where a man in a grey coat had left it at closing with his fingers still damp from the rain. Every letter leaned the same way, as if the words were being hauled up a slope by a rope.

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She had taken the night desk because the day desk belonged to Mrs Pryce, who wrote like a schoolmistress and never forgave a loop. At midnight the trams stopped and the city went quiet enough to hear the river under the bridges. Nell worked by feel, tracing each downstroke with a steel nib, and the capitals kept tangling with the small letters like brambles in a hedge.

The envelope was addressed to nobody she knew, care of a hotel that had burned down in 1911. She read it twice, then a third time out of stubbornness, and found the instruction hidden in the flourish of the first capital: keep the line unbroken, and climb. So she went up the iron stairs to the clock room, where the old copybooks were kept, and found the man's signature on a receipt dated forty years before, the same leaning hand, the same refusal to lift the pen.

She wrote the last line on the back of the envelope just as the first grey tram rattled past the window. The ink ran from the top of the page to the bottom without a single break, and when she pressed the flap down she felt the strokes settle into the paper like a long breath let out. She posted it through the brass slot and did not look to see who came for it.