Black and white photo of a woman's bare back showing a fine line script tattoo running vertically down the spine, below a loose hair bun.

Vertical script line down the spine

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with her hair in a loose bun and a white scoop-neck vest top is seen from behind, sitting on a light sofa. A thin, delicate line of small script runs vertically down the centre of her back from the nape of the neck towards the waist. The photograph is in black and white, so the ink appears as fine dark grey strokes against the skin.

Fine line Lettering Back Script Spine Word

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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

Pass me the bone folder, and mind the paste, boy, it's still warm from the stove. No, leave the lamp where it is. The light falls better across the sewing frame at this hour, and I want you to see how the thread goes in before you start thinking you know what a book is.

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The commission came up from Lewes in a carrier's cart, wrapped in oilcloth. A ledger of letters, two hundred pages, every one written by a widow to a man who never came home from the Crimea. The sender wanted the words kept in the order they were written and set down the spine, not across the page, so that a reader pulling the volume from a shelf would read it the way you read a stair going down. Nobody had asked me for that before, and I said yes before I'd thought it through.

I cut the sections, sewed them on five cords, and laid the title out in my own careful hand. Then I spent three nights with a fine brush and iron gall, writing the widow's sentences one letter above the next along the strip of calfskin where the spine would sit. My hand cramped. The ink ran where I breathed on it. By the third dawn the lines looked like a fence of small grey birds, and I had to tilt my head to read a word of my own work.

The man who collected it was a clerk with clean cuffs. He turned it over, ran his thumb down the spine, and frowned at the letters. Then he tilted his head the way I had, and read it aloud from the top, slow, and his voice caught on the last line. He paid in full and never opened the cover again. Some things you make to be carried, boy, not to be understood.