Vertical Hebrew lettering tattoo in dark ink on the back of a person's neck, with the head turned away from the camera.

Vertical Hebrew script on the back of the neck

Lettering · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A close view from behind shows a person with hair pulled up, wearing a knitted jumper and a thin chain. A vertical line of Hebrew script runs down the back of the neck in dark, solid ink with clean, even strokes. The plain background and soft natural light keep the focus on the lettering.

Lettering Neck Text Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Miriam, forgive the wobble in this hand. I have been up a ladder since Tuesday, and a signwriter's brush does not forgive a shaky wrist. Mr Abrahams wants his name across the new bakery in gold leaf, and the window is so narrow it could be a church door, with no room to lay the lettering flat. So I have set it upright instead, one letter stacked above the next, to be read from the top down the way our old scribes wrote their columns.

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The trouble was the spacing. Each character needs its own breath of air around it or the whole thing runs together like wet ink. I stood on the fourth rung with the pot hooked on my belt and thought of you at seven, sitting on the kitchen stool and tracing the alphabet with your finger until the page went soft and grey. You were never patient with the slow letters. You liked the ones with the hooks on the end, which you said looked like they were trying to climb out of the line.

On Thursday the baker's wife came out with a tray of rolls and asked if I could make it lean. She thought a slant would catch the eye from the market. I told her the letters stand straight or they say nothing true. She laughed and said I was as stubborn as the oven door, and she was right, and she paid me in rye bread, which your mother says is the only sensible currency left in this street. The fair people across the road watched us work all afternoon, and the boy with the painted face clapped when the last letter went on.

By dusk the gold had caught the lamps and the whole column blazed above the door like a lit match standing on its end. I signed my name at the bottom where the eye stops. Come home at Pesach and read it for yourself, top to bottom, the way I taught you. Then tell me whether I have got the spacing right, because I still cannot tell from the ladder.