Close-up of a fine black script tattoo reading Amor across a finger, with a blue opal ring on the same hand.

Amor script tattoo on a finger

Lettering · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A thin black cursive word, Amor, is tattooed along the length of one finger of a hand held up against a pale background. The linework is smooth and even, with no shading, and the ink is dark black. The hand also wears a silver ring with a blue opal and small clear stones, and has bright pink nail polish, which are the only colours in the frame.

Lettering Fine line Hand Script Word Ring Nail

Find an artist for this

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

Brother Anselm never let anyone rush a capital, and he said the same about a single word, which was why the abbot's letter took three weeks to finish. Ink first, then the quill, then the long slow hairline of every stroke. He had been copying psalms since before the east wall cracked, and he had a rule: a word written in one breath was a word that would be forgotten by harvest.

Keep reading

The letter was for a glassmaker's daughter across the water named Ysolde Marr, who had sent one line asking how to say I am still here without sounding like a debt. Anselm wrote back a single word, Amor, and sent the page down to the harbour with a boy who could not read it. He did not tell her the loops were taken from the tail of an old hymn, nor that he had practised the swoop of the A on the back of a eel-skin binding for four nights.

She came to the abbey gate in March, wanting the word where it could not be mislaid. Ysolde had a ring her mother left her, a blue opal set in small white stones, and she said the word should sit beside it like a lamp. Anselm warned her the ink would blur if she washed too often. She said she would wash as often as she liked. He took out the finest pen he owned, and for the first time in forty years he wrote without a ruled line beneath him, trusting the skin to hold still.

The ink took well. Anselm bound the finger in linen and told her to keep it out of the sea for a month. Years later a sailor from that harbour brought him a letter with the same looping hand on its back, and asked who had taught it. Anselm said he had learned it from someone who wanted every page read slowly.