Black lettering-style ampersand tattoo on the inner wrist of a hand with red painted nails, against a dark grey background.

Ampersand tattoo on a wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close view of an open hand with a single black ampersand tattoo on the inner wrist, its flowing curves ending in a loop at the lower right. The linework is solid and even, with no shading, and the ink is a dark grey-black. The hand fills the right of the frame against a dim, out-of-focus grey surface.

Lettering Forearm Ampersand Symbol 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 rain has found the gap between your collar and your neck by the time you reach Maud's trestle at the far end of the market, where the awnings sag under standing water and the pigeons have given up. She has her old type laid out in wooden trays, sorted by size, and she doesn't look up. "Ampersand's in the tin under the quoins," she says. "Only one. Don't go hoping for a pair."

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You dig through the tin. Lead and brass clink against your knuckles. The sort is worn on its face, the ink long gone, but the curl at the bottom right still holds its loop, the way a hand sweeps out to catch something before it drops. Your father set type for the Evening Courier until it closed in 1979, and he used to say the ampersand was the only letter that refused to commit. It meant and, and it meant with, and it meant the thing you couldn't say plainly. You had come for the rest of the sign, the letters for the bakery you and your sister keep talking about, and you had come for a pair, because a sign with one half is just a question. Two pounds, she says. You pay in coins that smell of wet pockets.

Back at the flat you clamp the sort in the small press, ink it with a roller gone hard at the edges, and pull a print onto a scrap of cartridge paper. The first is smudged. The second is clean: one black mark, its tail sweeping off the edge of the sheet as if it had somewhere else to be.

You pin it above the kettle, where the steam will curl the corner. It joins nothing. It is only ever the word that comes between two other words, and tonight, with the rain still ticking on the skylight, that seems like enough.