Woman seen from behind in a white open-back top, with a fine line black tattoo of small vertical characters running down the middle of her back.

Vertical script tattoo down the spine

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with long blonde hair stands on a paved street, photographed from behind. A column of small black characters runs down the centre of her spine, with the fine, detailed marks spaced evenly from the shoulder area to the lower back. The image is in full colour, but the tattoo is black ink on skin, and the white top and denim shorts frame the subject against a softly blurred street.

Fine line Back Spine Character Column Symbol Script

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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 card is still warm from the hall radiator when Mrs Pellow presses it into your hand, and you wipe your thumb on your trousers before you open it. Nine short lines in a script you almost recognise, the strokes stacked neatly down the page like rain running down a window. Her husband wrote it for her in 1961, in a language that died out in their village before either of them was born. Her granddaughter has decided to have it inked down her spine for the wedding, and the artist needs the real thing, not a cousin's guess, by morning.

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You have a steady hand and a good nib, so you take the card to the empty kitchen of the Mill House and work under the strip light while the marquee guys argue about guy ropes outside. Dried honesty stands in a jug by the kettle. Each character needs a breath before the next, and somewhere around the fifth line you stop trying to read the words and simply follow the column, the way you would follow a stair in the dark.

At one in the morning you hold the copy up against the original and find a tenth mark at the foot of the card, faint, pressed harder than the rest. You cannot place it in any alphabet you know, so you draw it as well as you can and sign your own name beside it, feeling foolish.

At breakfast Mrs Pellow runs one finger down your copy, stops at the tenth mark, and laughs. That's his signature, she says. He never wrote a letter without it. Then she folds the card into her handbag and tells you the bride will be fine, and you think she means the ink, though you are not sure she does.