Black and grey realism tattoo of a shaded basketball with the word Love in script lettering across the upper arm.

Basketball and love script on upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A shaded basketball with its seam lines sits at the centre of the design, with the word Love written in flowing script on either side and across its lower half. The ball uses soft grey shading to suggest volume and light, while the lettering is drawn in a smooth, single-weight grey line. The image is a close, straight-on photograph of the upper arm against a dark background, with a faint outline partly visible at the top left edge.

Lettering Realism Upper arm Love Script Ball

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ball had been left on the top step of the Marlow Court garages since Tuesday, and by Friday Ivy Crane decided it was hers to deal with. She carried it in against her hip, grey with rain, a seam split near one of the panels, and set it on the kitchen table beside the kettle. Her son Dean would have had a fit. He had played for the county under-fifteens until a knee put paid to it, and he still talked about that ball the way other men talked about old girlfriends.

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She found the pump in the cupboard under the stairs, along with a tin of loose buttons and a Christmas card addressed to someone who had moved away in 1998. Inflating the ball took twenty minutes and most of her patience. When it finally came up firm, the leather caught the strip light and she saw what the rain had hidden: someone had scratched a word into the panel with a compass point, Love, the letters so careful they could only have been done slowly, with the tongue between the teeth.

She rang the youth club number on the noticeboard. A boy called Tyrell answered, breathing hard from the court. The ball was Marcus's, he said. Marcus had gone to his nan's in Leeds in the spring and never come back for it, and he had cried about it in the car park when he thought nobody was looking. Ivy put the phone down and sat for a while with her coat still on.

She bounced it once on the wet tarmac the next morning, and the sound came back off the flats like an answer. Tyrell was already waiting by the fence with his hands in his hoodie. Ivy didn't mention the word. She passed the ball over, watched him check the seam, and saw him turn it so the lettering faced up before he tucked it under his arm.