Small black vertical lettering tattoo on the upper chest, shown in a close photo of a person with long wavy hair and a grey vest top.

Vertical lettering tattoo on the chest

Lettering · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A small black tattoo of vertical lettering sits on the upper chest, just below the collarbone, between the chest and the neckline of a grey vest top. The letters are solid black with clean edges and a bold, narrow appearance, and the text is too small and angled to read clearly in this photo. The warm-toned, close shot is taken from the side with the subject's long wavy hair falling over the right side of the frame.

Lettering Chest Text Lettering

Find an artist for this

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 column at Vell Hollow was already thirty feet of grey limestone when Master Ottery handed me the chisel and told me to start at the top and not look down. I was fifteen. My letters came out narrow and stiff, like fence posts, so he made me cut them again and again, until my wrist learned to lean into the stone rather than fight it.

Keep reading

Vertical lettering, he said, is a cheat. The eye wants to read left to right, so you must make the reader turn their head like a bird following a fence line. Each letter stands on the one above, and if one slips a hair, the whole line leans. He kept a bronze plumb bob on a cord in his coat and dropped it beside every stroke I made, as if the stone itself might lie.

The queen's motto went down the shaft in the old serifed script, each letter no wider than a thumb. Nobody in the lower town could read it from the square, and Ottery liked that. 'A thing written for the sky,' he said, 'should be read by whoever climbs the stair.'

The autumn the stair was finished, a girl from the salt works came up with a basket of mussels for the scullery. At the landing she stopped, tilted her head, and traced the letters with one finger, mouthing them slowly from top to bottom. Then she laughed and went on down without the basket, because she had forgotten it. That night Ottery cut my name beneath the motto, very small, where nobody would look but someone climbing.