Black and grey lettering tattoo reading Beauty is found within in a blackletter style on the inner forearm.

Beauty is found within script on the forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a forearm carrying the words Beauty is found within in a dark, blackletter-style script, set on three lines. The lettering is solid and even, with clean edges and no shading, and the greyscale photo sits against a blurred striped fabric background. The text fills the centre of the frame, with the skin's natural creases visible below it.

Lettering Forearm Quote Text Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the fortieth day out of Valparaíso the bosun had stopped asking me to letter anything but lifebuoys, so when Mrs Oakes, the cabin passenger with the green parasol, came up the companionway with a folded half-sheet of paper, I took it as a kindness to the ship. She wanted a motto for the lid of her sea chest. She had written it out in pencil over three lines and underlined the middle one twice.

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I had a tin of japan black and a size two sable, and the roll of the hull made every stroke a small argument. I laid the capitals first, the B and the f, because old blackletter wants its heavy strokes down before the hairlines or the whole thing sags like wet canvas. Mrs Oakes sat on an upturned bucket and watched the words come up out of the grain of the wood. She said her husband had painted the same phrase over a cottage door in Devon, and it had outlasted him by thirty years.

On the forty-third day a squall took the foretopmast and the chest slid the length of the hold and cracked along one corner. I expected to be asked for my money back. Instead she came down with a lamp, ran her thumb along the letters without touching the split, and asked whether the paint in the middle line had set. It had not. She nodded as though that settled something.

We raised Falmouth on a grey Thursday. She went ashore with the chest on a borrowed cart, and I never learned whether the lid was opened for anything but linen. What I kept was the way she read the words aloud on the quay, slowly, the way you might read a name off a headstone, before she counted out my shillings into my palm one at a time.