Black and grey fine line tattoo of ornamental script running vertically down the centre of a woman's back, photographed in black and white.

Vertical script tattoo down the spine

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman sits on a wooden floor facing away from the camera, with her arms raised and hands in her hair and her head turned away. A column of thin, ornamental script-like marks runs straight down the spine from the upper back to the base of the back. The black and white photograph shows fine, dark linework against plain grey walls and floorboards.

Fine line Back Spine Script Ornamental Woman

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lock ledger at Thornbury holds forty years of entries, and you are the only one who ever reads the margins. Your aunt kept her tallies down the side of every page in a hand so small it looked like barbed wire. A column of little hooked marks ran from the head of each sheet to the foot, one for every boat that cleared the gates on the ebb. She told you once that a column was easier to keep than a line, because a line could wander off the edge of the paper, but a column only ever had to go down.

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In February the Marigold came up through the cut with a cracked tiller and a man called Ferris who swore he had paid the toll at Hobb's Weir. You knew he hadn't. You turned back through the book to the March your aunt's knees gave out, and found her column stopped halfway down the page. Nobody had finished it. For three weeks the gates had been worked by a parish boy who could not read the marks, and every boat that passed had gone unrecorded, which was how Ferris had got through without paying anyone.

You showed him the page. He read it with his lips moving, then counted out the difference in coins that were warm from his pocket and said nothing at all about the boy. When the Marigold had slid off towards the bridge, you sat down at the scarred table with the lamp turned up and dipped the pen.

You started the next mark under hers, where the paper ran out at the bottom of the sheet and the ink was still fresh on the one above. Outside, the water kept moving over the gates, and the column went on, one hook at a time, the way she had taught you, because a column only ever had to go down.