Pencil drawing of a clenched fist with red nails, showing the words be kind to yourself and a small heart as lettering tattoo design on the forearm.

Be kind to yourself lettering on a drawn wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Colour · Flash

A coloured pencil drawing of a fist with red painted nails, rendered in soft skin tones with smooth shading on the knuckles and fingers. The lettering reads be kind to yourself in a light blue-grey script with a small heart below, drawn on the inner wrist and forearm. The hand fills the upper part of an open sketchbook, with coloured pencils resting at the left edge.

Lettering Forearm Hand Fist Text Heart Wrist Nail

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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

Nobody bought the big sketchbook at Halloran's on Gloucester Road without Dora asking first whether they meant to draw something they would be sorry for. She asked it of me every Thursday for eleven years, the summer I took over the counter from her husband. I thought it an odd question for a shop that sold graphite and gum arabic, until the Thursday a young student came in with a fistful of coins and asked for the sharpest pencils in the place.

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She had been drawing her own hand, she said, because it was the only thing in the flat that stayed still while she worked out what to say to her mother. A fist, knuckles pale with effort, a stripe of red on every nail. She wanted the colour right. We spent twenty minutes at the tin of coloured pencils, and I told her that skin is never one shade. You layer ochre over peach, then a cool grey-blue where the shadow falls, and she laughed when I said the shadows always go blue, even in a kitchen with the kettle on.

She came back in the spring with the finished sheet. The wrist was lettered in a soft grey-blue, be kind to yourself, with a small heart beneath. I asked her whether the words were for the hand or for the woman holding it. She tapped the page with a thumbnail painted the same red and said the hand had been doing all the arguing for years, and it was time somebody else took a turn.

She left the sketchbook on the counter, open at that page, and when I went to close the shop that night the lines had smudged where her palm had rested. I left it open. Dora says I am soft. Some nights I think she is right, and some nights I think that is exactly what a shop like this is for.