A woman with curly hair shows a vertical column of black non-Latin lettering tattooed down the centre of her upper back, between the straps of her beaded dress.

Vertical script tattoo down the upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows a woman seen from behind, with her hair pinned up and her back bare above a beaded dress with crossed straps. A single vertical column of dark, blocky characters runs down the centre of her upper back, and the characters resemble a non-Latin script. The ink is solid black with clean edges, set against warm, sunlit skin and a brick wall in the background.

Lettering Back Script Character Woman Hair Dress

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last of the foundry's punches went into the crate on a wet Tuesday, and Ada Quill was the one left to count them. Forty-one characters for a script nobody in the city could read any more, blocky as fence posts, cut by her grandfather from a sheet he had copied off a ship's manifest in 1931. He had never told anyone what the column said. He had only told her to keep it straight.

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She laid the punches out on the bench under the skylight, one above the other, the way he had arranged them for printing a spine. The light went amber through the dust. Outside, the lorry from the wharf sounded its horn twice, impatient, and she ignored it, because the seventh punch had a nick in its shoulder that she did not remember making. A nick in a punch is a word that has been struck wrong.

She found the proof sheet in the drawer of the cabinet where he kept the fox-grey ink. Someone had pressed the whole column onto paper, and beneath it, in pencil, in his hand, was a single line: For whoever reads it upside down. She turned the sheet over twice, looking for the rest, and found only the watermark of a heron.

She packed the punches anyway, all but the seventh. That one she slid into the pocket of her coat, where it knocked against her hip all the way to the station. On the train she held the proof up to the window and read the column from the top, the way it was meant to be read, and it said nothing a stranger would understand. That, she decided somewhere past Doncaster, was the point of it.