Black lettering tattoo on a forearm reading Beauty in flowing script with a flourish above, and BEAST in vertical blackletter capitals below.

Beauty and beast lettering on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a forearm with two black lettering tattoos. The word Beauty sits across the upper arm in a flowing script with a decorative flourish beneath it, while BEAST runs vertically down the forearm in bold blackletter capitals. The ink is solid black with clean edges, set against pale skin and a dark, softly lit background.

Lettering Forearm Beast Script Blackletter Flourish Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

My mother named the barge Beauty because she thought nobody would expect it of a working boat with a coal stove and a leaking gland. She had the name lettered in gold on the cabin side, with a flourish under it like a wave, and for thirty years it was the only thing on the Leeds and Liverpool that anyone admired. We were the family who slept with the bilge pump running.

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The tug moored opposite us was the Beast, black-hulled and iron-ribbed, skippered by a man called Sully Dunn who thought nothing of shoving a lock gate with his bow. He painted her name down the side in letters so thick they looked wet, and when he saw my mother's gold he laughed until he coughed. Beauty and Beast, he said, the pair of us tied up like a music hall joke.

The winter the Calder burst its banks, the water came over the towpath in a single night. Our mooring rings tore loose from the wall, and Beauty swung out broadside toward the weir with my mother asleep in the bunk. Sully was out in his coat before I had the lantern lit. He ran a rope from the Beast's stern to our bow and dug his heels in, cursing every inch of the way, until the current had nothing left to take.

By morning the flood had dropped and the gold letters on our cabin were dull with silt. Sully scraped at them with his thumb. Still a beauty, he said, under all that muck, and he went home to dry his boots. My mother never let anyone paint over the name again.