Black lettering tattoo running vertically down the centre of a woman's back, shown from behind with her hair up.

Vertical lettering down the spine

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman is photographed from behind, wearing an embellished dress with crossed straps that leave her back bare. A vertical column of black lettering runs down the centre of her spine, with lines of text too small to read clearly at this size. The ink is black only, set against warm skin, a brick wall and a wooden door in the background.

Lettering Back Lettering Text Spine

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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

Nobody in Scarrow could make out the hand, so the postmaster sent the letter up the hill to Hester Vane, who had taught the village children their letters for thirty years and had never once been fooled by a blot.

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It was written down the length of a single sheet, one word above another, the way a man writes when he has only the width of a finger to spare. Hester held it to the window, turned it sideways, then upside down, and found the words ran in a column, the way a mast runs from deck to crow's nest. Each line began with a name. Each name was a boat that had gone out from the harbour and not come back.

She copied them out in her good ink, all forty-one, and walked the fair copy down to the quay on a Sunday when the boats were drawn up on the shingle. Hard Jack Ferris read the list with his lips moving, then tore his own name off the bottom, folded it twice, and dropped it in the tide.

"The sea keeps its own accounts," he said, "and it's kept them square." Hester went home and held the original sheet to the lamp. Read from the bottom upwards, the column of names gave up one more word, faint in the grain, pressed in by a pencil that had been pressed very hard: home.