Black script lettering set in several vertical lines across the upper back, shown in a close-up photograph of the skin.

Vertical script lettering across upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A close-up photograph of a tattoo made up of several vertical lines of black script lettering running down the upper back, near the shoulder blade. The strokes are smooth, with varied thickness and flowing loops, and the ink appears crisp against the skin. The image is tightly cropped with a plain skin background and a blurred wall of framed pictures behind.

Lettering Back Script Lettering Calligraphy Text Phrase

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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

The snow has been coming sideways since noon, and the landlady of the Hollin Ferry Inn has put you in the back room with the warped shutters because it is the only one with a working lamp. On the table lies a folded sheet of vellum that a carter left behind in November. Nobody has been able to read it. The landlady says the carter's brother was a bookbinder who went north to sell clocks, and he spoke of letters that stand up on the page like rows of fence posts.

Keep reading

You spend the first hour certain it is cipher. You copy the strokes onto a slate with a stub of chalk, counting loops, noticing that every upright line bends at the same height, as if the hand that wrote them was keeping time to a bell. The wind worries at the eaves. Downstairs somebody drops a tray and laughs, and the laughing goes on a long time, the way it does when people have been shut in too many days.

Near midnight you stop trying to decode and start listening to the shape. Read down, not across, the landlady had said, so you do, and the sounds rise off the page like a name called slowly from another room. It is not a message so much as a list of places a person might walk back to in the dark: a ford, a lit window, a gate with a lamp hung on it. You write the last line on the slate and the chalk snaps in your fingers.

In the morning the road is ploughed. The carter's sheet goes back into the landlady's drawer, and you keep the slate, wiping it once, then writing the lamp-gate line again so you will not lose it.