Small black ampersand tattoo in a lettering style on the wrist of a person with their hand raised.

Ampersand tattoo on a wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A single black ampersand sits on the wrist, drawn as a clean, solid glyph with smooth curves. The ink is uniform black with no shading, set against pale skin and a plain light background. The close, centred framing places the tattoo in the middle of the image, with the raised hand and silver nail polish at the top edge.

Lettering Forearm Ampersand Symbol Wrist

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

The ampersand came off the press crooked, its upper loop leaning like a drunk man against a lamppost, and Brother Anselm swore in three languages before he would let it go to the binder. He had cut the type himself, filing each curve from a sliver of pewter in the cold shed behind the chapter house, and he was prouder of that small knot than of any psalm. It was meant to stand for the word and, the abbot had decreed, which was the chapter's old joining of two things that were not the same and yet had to be read together.

Keep reading

The binder's girl, Mercy Oakes, who had come up from the village to sew signatures for a shilling a week, said the glyph looked like a sleeping swan folded in on itself. Anselm told her swans did not appear in the Rule. She laughed and pricked her thumb on the needle, and a bead of blood fell on the page beside the mark, spreading into the vellum like a tiny second loop.

When the book reached the library shelves that winter, nobody could say which of the monks had first traced that stain with a fingertip and then, very quietly, a finger of ink. By spring the ampersand was copied into the margins of every ledger in the house, and the abbot, who had never once smiled at a printing error, let it stand.