Back view of a woman with a fine black vertical script tattoo running down between her shoulder blades, wearing a white lace off-shoulder top and taking a mirror selfie.

Vertical script tattoo on upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman seen from behind holds a phone up to a mirror, with her hair in a high bun. A black vertical script tattoo with a flourish at the top runs down the centre of her upper back. The white carved screen behind her and her white lace top give the image a bright, neutral palette with the ink as the only dark colour.

Lettering Back Script Flourish

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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

Marta Quill found the letter on the inside edge of a carved screen she had bought at a farm sale for the price of a bicycle. The lattice was so fine that the petals snapped if you leaned on them, and the ink ran down the wood in a single column, lifted and looping at the top like a signature written in a hurry. It was in a hand she did not know, and it ended without a name, only a line about a pear tree that was still standing.

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She spent a month on it. The sale catalogue gave a road outside Kilkee, the auctioneer remembered a carver called Ruth Ansel who had sold up the winter of the flood, and a postmistress in the next village said the Ansel place had a pear tree by the gable that nobody had pruned since the war. Marta drove out on a grey Tuesday with the screen roped to the roof rack and a roll of tracing paper under her arm.

The tree was there, bent and bare, and so was a man of about forty in wellingtons who said his mother had written that column to his father when they were young and the house still had a roof. He did not want the screen. He wanted the tracing, so he could cut the same line into a gatepost for his daughter's wedding. Marta unrolled the paper and laid it over the wood, and the ink came through the sheet like a stem with its own weather in it.

She drove home with the screen empty of its letter, which now stood in a gatepost in the rain, and the tracing folded in her coat pocket. It was an odd thing to answer a letter with a gatepost, but the pear tree had waited long enough for someone to reply.