Fine line black tattoo of angular letters on the inner forearm of a person wearing a white top.

Angular letters on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small black tattoo of angular letterforms sits on the inner forearm, drawn with thin, even linework. The letters are set in a simple row with sharp corners and open spacing. The photograph is in colour, with a pale skin tone, a white top at the left edge and a dark blurred background.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Lettering

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 third telegram that week came in the same hand as the first two, all sharp corners and open gaps, as if the sender had cut each letter out of tin. Dad had taught me the old Morse-room shorthand when I was twelve, but this was no code I knew. I copied it onto the back of a timetable and carried it along the platform to the signal box, where Mr Okafor was eating his sandwich over the levers.

Keep reading

He squinted at the paper and said the letters were railwaymen's marks, the kind chalked on wagon doors before the war so the right truck found the right yard. Two letters were a depot, one a line, and the last a number nobody used any more. We worked it out between the 4.10 and the milk train. The message was not really a message. It was a direction, and the place it pointed to had been on the far side of the cutting since 1931.

I walked the cutting that Sunday with a torch and a paper bag of lime. Behind a hawthorn, cut into the brick of an old culvert, were the same angular marks, weathered almost smooth. Someone had left them for whoever came looking, and the last one pointed straight at the rusted gate where the goods siding used to run. I pressed my palm to the cold brick and felt the edge of each letter, still sharp after all those winters.

I did not post a reply. I took the lime and drew the marks again beside the old ones, one stroke for each line, then went home for my tea and left the gate exactly as I found it.