Back view of a woman in an olive green open-back romper, showing a black script tattoo running vertically down her spine.

Vertical script tattoo down the back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with a high blonde ponytail stands facing away from the camera, wearing an olive green open-back romper and a tan crossbody bag. A fine black cursive script runs vertically down the centre of her upper and mid back, with thin strokes and light shading. The background is a plain white garage door, and the composition centres the tattoo against the bare skin.

Lettering Back Script Handwriting Quote

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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

Mr Pell wanted the words in copperplate, the kind his late wife had copied into her recipe book, but Mrs Hartley wanted them thin as a hair. I told her a sign-writer's brush can't do thin. It can, she said, if you press it lightly and never let it rest.

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I had the brush in my right hand and a jar of japan black in the other, painting the window of the Co-operative in Market Deeping while the frost ran off the glass in grey rivers. Every letter had to lean the same way, as if the whole line were walking into a wind. Behind me Dennis from the chemist's stood with his hands in his coat pockets, reading each word aloud as I finished it, slowly, the way you read a headstone.

The trouble with a long line is that you cannot see the end from the start. By the time I reached the last word my wrist had gone stiff and the stroke bent where I had meant it to straighten. I thought about scraping it off and beginning again, but the frost was already soaking into the paint and the shop opened at nine.

Mrs Hartley came by at noon and stood a long while in front of it. She didn't say it was wrong. She only said, that's how it sounded in my head, love, paid me in threepences, and walked off up the high street with her string bag, leaning a little the same way the letters did.