Black and white photo of a fine line script tattoo reading Beloved on the inner forearm, with a hand resting across the arm and a dark buttoned coat behind.

Beloved script on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows a woman's inner forearm with the word Beloved written in thin, cursive script in black ink, running diagonally up from the wrist towards the elbow. The linework is delicate and even, with no shading, and the image is monochrome. A hand with dark painted nails rests across the arm against a dark buttoned coat, which fills the background.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Script Word Cursive

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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

Dear Ilse, the queue at the crossing has not moved since six, so I am writing on the back of a customs declaration, the only paper the officer would spare me. He has searched my bag twice and read every envelope in it. He held up your letter, looked at the front of it, and asked whether the word written there was a name or an instruction. I told him it was a name. He said where he grew up people wrote words on the inside of their wrists so they would not forget them, and he handed the envelope back without opening it.

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Do you remember the afternoon in the back room above the bakery, when you copied the lettering off the sign painter's card? You held my arm flat on the table and followed the curl of the B three times over, until the lines were clean and even. Your hand was steady. You said a word should sit on the skin the way a stone sits in a river, without fuss, and that people would read it for the rest of my life and never ask what it meant. I thought that was a kindness then. I am less sure now that I have to carry it past a man with a torch.

He has come back down the line with the torch and is looking at my wrists again, though the form is already signed. I think he is deciding whether the word is a message or contraband. I am not going to explain it to him. I will say it is a name, the way I said before, and that a name is allowed across any line in the world. The lorries ahead have begun to move at last.

I will post this in the next town. Yours, as the word on my arm insists, M.