Black ink tattoo of the word Beauty in script lettering, with an ornate dagger blade running into the B, on the inner forearm.

Beauty script with blade on forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink tattoo on the inner forearm shows the word Beauty in flowing script, with an ornate dagger or blade extending from the left into the capital B. The lettering is outlined with bold, even lines and filled with solid dark grey to black shading. The photo is taken straight on against a dark car seat, with the tattoo centred across the arm.

Lettering Forearm Script Dagger Blade Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm had the smithy to himself the winter the abbey's bell cracked, and it was there he taught me to distrust a blade that looked lovely. "Ornament is a lie told to the hand," he said, turning a little dagger in the coals until the steel went the colour of straw. I was fifteen and thought he meant the lilies cut into the guard. I know now he meant the flourish.

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The commission came from a widow in Lincoln who wanted her late husband's paring knife made into something he would never have carried. She sent a drawing of a word, a looping hand that ran the length of a page, and asked for it cut into the spine of the blade. Anselm refused, then sat up three nights with a lamp and a rule, and on the fourth he showed me his sketch: the point running long and thin from the left, the letters swelling round the hilt so the B seemed to hold the steel the way a cupped hand holds a moth.

We cut it together. The lines had to be even or the word would wobble, and the hardest part was the tail of the y, which curled back on itself like a cat settling. Anselm said the trick was to let the hammer rest and let the file do the thinking. When the knife was finished it was not sharp at all, and he laughed at my face and said beauty, like an edge, had to be honed afterwards.

The widow came for it in March. She turned it to the window, read the word, and asked whether it would cut bread. Anselm said it would cut anything it was asked to. She slid it into her apron pocket without looking back at the smithy door, and I understood she had wanted the lettering more than the knife.