Black and grey lettering tattoo reading ART MUSIC LOVE with scroll flourishes on the inside of a wrist.

Art, music and love lettering on a wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey photograph of a hand and wrist with the words ART, MUSIC and LOVE set in decorative script, the lettering stacked and slightly overlapping. Curling scroll flourishes and small ornamental motifs frame the words on either side. The ink is solid black with clean, even outlines, and the soft grey background keeps the focus on the wrist.

Lettering Forearm Music Love Scrollwork Flourish Script

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

Sit down, the lot of you, and mind the wasps on the windfalls. I'll tell it the way my grandmother told it to me, under the Bramley trees at Hollin Farm, the summer the apples came early and nobody had the sense to pick them.

Keep reading

There was a sign-writer called Eli Corran who came up the lane in August with a ladder on his shoulder and a tin of black enamel that smelled of tar. He'd been lettering carts and gates for forty years, and the farmer's wife, Nan Holloway, had a daughter called Bess who played the fiddle better than the parish organ. Nan wanted three words over the cider-house door: ART, MUSIC, LOVE. She said they had to run into one another, because that was how the three of them lived in one house, and Corran said he'd do it for a barrel of cider and a tune.

So he painted them stacked, ART tipped on its shoulder, MUSIC leaning through it, LOVE curling underneath like a ribbon tied round a bottle neck. He framed them with scrolls and little leaves, and the sun went down behind the trees while he worked. Bess played reels the whole afternoon, and every time her bow slipped he laughed so hard he had to wipe his brush on his trousers.

When he finished, the farmer paid in coin and asked what he owed for the fiddle. Corran said nothing, only that the black would blur in the rain and he'd be back to touch it up. He never came back. Nan kept the barrel. The words greyed over the years, and Bess married a man who painted lorries, and that's the end of it, except that every August the apples drop on that roof, and if you listen close you can hear a reel going on under the tiles.