Vertical script down the spine
Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo
A black and white photograph of a person seen from behind, sitting on a pale sofa with their hair in a loose bun and wearing a white scoop-back vest top. A thin column of small, fine line lettering runs vertically down the centre of the spine from between the shoulder blades towards the lower back. The text is too small to read clearly, and the soft, even lighting keeps the focus on the delicate linework and the bare skin.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
Mr Ogden had gilded shop fronts in Bradford for thirty-one years, and he had never been asked to fit a sentence into a gap the width of a bootlace. "It has to run straight down," Nell said, pressing her palm flat against the narrow pine strip beside the shop door. "Top to bottom. Nothing sideways."
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He mixed his size and laid the letters out on a scrap of card first, counting them under his breath with the tip of his brush. Forty-one letters, not counting the gaps he had decided to leave, because gaps were where a line could breathe. Each letter was hardly bigger than a grain of rice. He braced his left wrist against the wall to stop it shaking, and twice he wiped the whole column away with his thumb and started again.
"Will anyone be able to read it?" he asked, when the last stroke was dry.
"No," she said, and seemed pleased by the idea. "Only the one it's meant for, and she knows it already."
The sign went up in March, above a shop that sold thread and buttons. Mr Ogden walked past it every Tuesday after that. From the pavement the strip looked like a crack in the paint, or a hair caught in the varnish, and nobody ever stopped to ask what it said, which he supposed was exactly the point.
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