White ink script tattoo reading Believe with swirling flourishes on a forearm, in a lettering style.

Believe script on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A photograph of the word Believe in flowing cursive script with looping flourishes beneath the letters. The tattoo is in white ink, so the linework appears pale and soft against the skin rather than dark. The lettering fills the centre of the frame on a plain, lightly lit forearm.

Lettering Forearm Believe Word Script Flourish

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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 on the guided tour ever looked up at the chapel's east wall, so it fell to me to notice the word. I had been sent up from the county office with a torch, a tin of lime wash and a clipboard that wanted a condition report by Friday. The low grey light through the broken lancet caught the plaster at an angle, and that was when the letters showed: pale strokes pressed into the render, a fat loop under the B, a swash that ran off the edge like a kite string. Someone had written it with a finger dipped in lime, two or three centuries back, and the damp had kept it from going anywhere.

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The parish register in the village had a Ruth Pyle, laundress to the castle household, who was entered in March 1743 as leaving service. Her husband had gone out with the fishing boats that winter and not come back. I found her name again in a list of tenants struck through in a different ink, and then nothing. I told myself the word was probably a scrap of a psalm copied by a bored lad with a pot of whitewash, and I wrote that down, because it was true enough for a condition report.

That evening I went back alone with a cup of tea gone cold and the torch held flat against the stone. The letters were fainter than I remembered, and I had to move my head to find the flourish beneath them, which curled back on itself as if the hand that made it had stopped to think. I did not write the word into the report. I wrote condition: fair, surface friable, recommend no intervention, and then I sat there a long time with my thumb resting just beside the B, not touching, the way you would beside a sleeping child.