Back view of a woman in a grey crossover sports bra, showing a black vertical script tattoo running down the centre of the upper back.

Vertical script tattoo on upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows the back of a woman wearing a grey marl crossover sports bra, with a black vertical script tattoo running down the centre of her back. The lettering is sharp and solid with a fine, consistent stroke and is set against warm skin under soft, even light. The plain pale background keeps the focus on the tattoo and the bra's crossed straps.

Lettering Back 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 post stood where the salt road bent north, and its words ran down the grey wood one beneath the other, the way a line of ants climbs a wall. Nobody in Ysel could read them but old Tamsin Gare, who had learned her letters from a carrier who came through twice a year and never stayed long. When the dust came up behind the mule train that spring, she walked out to the post with a lamp and a pot of black pitch, because the young men were arguing about whether the words still meant anything.

Keep reading

They did. Read from the top, the post said KEEP THE SUN ON YOUR LEFT, then DO NOT DRINK FROM THE RED POOL, and at the bottom, where the wood had split, WELL IS UNDER THE LEANING STONE. The drivers had long since stopped looking, trusting their compasses and their own mouths. Tamsin wiped the cracked letters clean with a rag, then went over each one with the brush, slow and even, the way her mother had taught her to turn a hem.

The storm reached the road at dusk. Three drivers and their animals came in out of it, blind and coughing, and they stumbled along the post until a boy named Ibrahim found the leaning stone with his boot. Under it the water was cold and sweet, and the mules drank until their sides shook.

Tamsin never asked for thanks. The drivers left a sack of dates at the foot of the post each season, and the first word on the wood, KEEP, grew so dark with pitch that by autumn it looked newer than the rest.