Back view of a woman with a long fishtail braid showing a black fine script lettering tattoo running vertically down the spine, placed on the upper back.

Vertical script tattoo along the spine

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows a woman seen from behind, with a long fishtail braid falling over one shoulder and a bare back. A vertical line of cursive script runs down the centre of the spine, drawn in black ink with fine, even strokes. The ink is black and grey, and the soft, neutral background keeps the focus on the tattoo and the back.

Lettering Back Script Word Spine

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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 envelope had been opened twice before it reached my desk at Hollin Crossing, and both times someone had taken care to tape it shut again. I stamped the customs slip and turned it over before reading anything else, because that is the habit a job like mine gives you. The address was a single line in a town I had never heard of, written in looping cursive, the kind my grandmother used before the schools stopped teaching it.

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Inside was one sheet in the same hand, the ink pressed hard at the top and lightening towards the foot of the page, as if the writer had run short of either nerve or ink. It began without a greeting: Stay where the river bends and do not write to the house. I read it twice. A customs stamp is a small thing to set against a sentence like that, but I set it there all the same.

Procedure said the paper went into the eastern mail sack, and I should have let it go. Instead I copied the lines onto a scrap of card, first in my own careless capitals, then slowly in the script, the way you learn a language from a child's reader. My loops came out clumsy. I checked the atlas that evening and could not find a river that bent anywhere near that town.

On Thursday a woman came to the window with a battered holdall and asked whether anything was waiting for her. I handed her the card with my practice lines on it instead. She studied it for a long time, then slid it back across the counter. 'You've got the bend wrong,' she said, and walked out into the rain without another word.