Black and grey vertical lettering in small blocky characters runs down the spine of a bare back, from the nape towards the lower back.

Vertical script line down the spine

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey photograph of a person's bare upper back with dark hair falling over the shoulders. A single vertical line of small, angular script characters runs down the centre of the spine from the nape of the neck, and the characters are crisp and evenly spaced. The background is soft and the shot is monochrome, with the tattoo as the clear focal point.

Lettering Back Script Character Spine Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Ruth,

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The wagons pulled into Market Hallow on Tuesday, and the wheel is up again, though the north side still sags where the frost got into the bolts. I have not told Mr Oakes that the letters on the centre pole are lifting. You will remember he would not pay for proper gilt, so I did the lettering myself in the old hand your grandmother taught us from the church register: small, angular, one character stacked beneath the last, so a boy standing at the foot of the pole can read the whole name without tipping his head.

The name is the thing I cannot get right. Every morning I climb the ladder with the tin of black and try to remember whether the seventh letter ends in a hook or a tail, and every morning the pole seems a little taller than it was the day before.

Yesterday a young woman came to the gate holding a ticket from the Lowmoor fair and asked me to read it back to her. She had stood at the foot of this pole as a child, she said, and the name had told her something about where she was going. I read it out letter by letter, and at the end I found I had been painting it upside down all along. The first character was at the bottom, and the last one sat at the top, where the rain could not reach it.

I have come down and left the tin open on the step. If you take the Saturday train, bring your own brush. I think we ought to finish the thing properly before the frost comes back, and I would rather you held the ladder than Mr Oakes.