Bold black block lettering reading BELIEVE tattooed on a forearm, with a slightly shaded, dimensional look.

Believe lettering on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of the word BELIEVE in bold, chunky black capitals, set at a slight upward angle across the forearm. The letters have a blocky, three-dimensional edge with some shading and a slightly textured fill. The ink is solid black against a warm skin tone, with a plain white top and dark trousers blurred at the edges of the frame.

Lettering Forearm Believe Word

Find an artist for this

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

The paint tin has been open since Madeira, and a skin has formed on top of it the colour of weak tea. You stir it with a bent nail because the stirrer went over the side in the Bay of Biscay, and you tell the second mate the word needs to be big enough to read from the bridge wing. He says nobody on a grain tramp reads anything but the tide tables. You do not argue. You have a brush in one hand and a pencil in the other, and the pencil lines on the wheelhouse door are already smudged by the spray.

Keep reading

Four weeks out from Montevideo the cook has stopped speaking, and the youngest deckhand, Tomasz, has been sleeping with his boots on. Nobody asks what the word is for. You are sixty-one and have painted a great many words on a great many hulls: names mostly, port of registry, load lines in white. This one you block out in capitals as thick as a man's thumb, then build the depth with a darker mix along the lower edges so each letter stands off the steel as if it might walk away.

When you finish, the sun is coming up behind the swell and the letters throw their shadows sideways across the deck. Tomasz comes up from below, reads it, and frowns at the E as though it had been spelt wrong. You tell him that is the trick of it, that you have to lean in close and then step back before you can see the thing whole. He stands in front of it a long time with his hands in his pockets. Then he goes below and comes back up with a second brush.