Black lettering tattoo reading pura in a clean sans serif, set vertically down the back of a person's neck.

Vertical word tattoo on the back of the neck

Lettering · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A close view of the back of a person's neck shows a single word tattooed vertically, appearing to read pura when turned. The letters are drawn in thin, even black linework with a clean sans serif face and no shading. The plain skin, pale hair and blurred street behind keep the focus on the lettering.

Lettering Neck Word Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gold leaf had gone cold in the shed, so I breathed on the tin before I touched it. Dad always said you could tell a signwriter by his hands and his patience, and that winter I had neither. I had a hull on the slip at Carrow Quay, the Gannet Rose, and a commission from a widow who wanted one word down the stern and nothing else.

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'Pura,' she said, watching me sketch. 'My husband's word. He said it meant clean. The water, the air, his conscience. He never said which he'd sooner I thought of first.'

Letters stacked vertically do not sit straight on a transom. I learned that with chalk, rubbing out the P three times because it looked like a fence post. In the end I set the word down in a thin, even sans serif, the strokes no fatter than fishing line, and I painted each letter on its own so none of them could lean on the next. When I stood back, the Gannet Rose looked like she was speaking through a letterbox.

The widow came down the slip on the morning of the launch with her hat in her hand. She tilted her head at the stern the way people do at a painting, and then she laughed, which I hadn't expected. 'Read it from the water,' she said. 'He always made me stand on the mole and read the name back to him.'

I walked out with her to the end of the breakwater. The boat came round the light with the sun behind her, and the word ran down her stern in clean black letters, legible only to someone already at sea. The widow lifted one hand from the rail and I lifted mine, and neither of us needed to say which way up it was.