Woman seen from behind with a curly updo, wearing a beaded dress with crossed straps, showing a fine black lettering tattoo running vertically down her upper back.

Vertical script tattoo down the upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman is photographed from behind, showing a thin vertical line of black characters that run down the centre of her upper back, between the crossed straps of a beaded dress. The characters resemble Hebrew-style script, drawn in clean, fine black linework with no shading or colour. The warm light, brick wall and wooden door sit behind her, and her face is not visible.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mother, the ink has finally stopped smudging on the sheet, so I can tell you what Master Oszkar has made me copy all week. Forty lines of characters, each no wider than a grain of barley, set one beneath another down a strip of vellum no wider than my hand.

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He will not let me slant them. The letters must stand upright, he says, like men waiting at a door, and a word that leans has already given up. When I asked what the words said, he tapped the top line with his pen and said they say what the sender means and nothing more. He has answered every question that way since the fire took the shop's ledgers and half the type.

On Thursday a woman came in from the rain holding a folded paper and asked for the same script, copied down the length of a thin ribbon she could hide under her collar. She wanted it fine as a hair. Oszkar sent me to the cabinet for the smallest nib, and while I wiped it on my sleeve I read the paper she had brought. It was a name written the old way, and it was mine, with the letters turned the wrong direction.

I am keeping the nib. When the stall is quiet tonight I will write my own name down the margin of this letter, one character to a line, standing straight as the master likes. You will know it is me by how upright the letters are.

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