Three photographs of a black vertical column of script-like glyphs tattooed from the shoulder down the back and along the calf and ankle.

Vertical script tattoo down shoulder, back and leg

Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

The image is a three-panel collage showing the same vertical column of black, script-like glyphs on a shoulder, down the middle of a bare back, and along a lower leg toward the ankle. The marks are solid black lines of even weight with no visible shading. The photographs are in warm, neutral tones with a plain light background, so the ink is the only strong colour in the composition.

Shoulder Back Calf Ankle Glyph Script Symbol Column

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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

Dear Mabel, the lock-keeper at Hollin Weir says the water is up another foot since Tuesday, so I have tied the Marigold to the iron ring and will not be going further until it drops. You asked in your last what I am doing with the coal money and I did not answer, so here it is. I have been copying the marks off the bargee's old ledger, the one with the cracked spine that Tom Ashby kept under his bunk. Nobody on the cut can read them, not even the Ashby boy who went to grammar school. They run down the page in a single column, one above the other, like someone climbing a ladder that was never finished.

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I sat up with the lamp last night and worked out that they are not letters at all but a count of locks, each mark a gate passed, the taller ones the flights. I have the sum wrong somewhere, I think, because the column does not end at Hollin. It keeps going past the last bridge we know, into water that is only drawn in pencil on the chart.

If you come up to the wharf on Saturday, bring the good pen and the tin of ink. I want you to check my hand against his before the ice comes. Your loving sister, Ada.