Fine line black script reading beloved on the inner wrist, with the arm resting on blue denim.

Beloved script on the inner wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small black tattoo of the word beloved, written in a thin handwritten script with a full stop after it, sits on the inner wrist. The lines are single and even, with no shading. The skin is light and the background is blue denim and a grey surface, so the ink stands out as the only dark mark in the frame.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Word Script Handwriting

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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

Right, sit down, the lot of you, the chairs are older than your marriages. I'll tell you about Miss Hallam, because nobody in this room ever gave her the credit she was owed, and I include myself.

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She taught us English in the room over the bicycle sheds, where the radiator knocked like a man wanting in. Every composition came back with a red mark and a comment about adverbs. At the foot of every page, under all that red, she wrote one word in pencil, thin and slanted, with a full stop after it. Beloved. Terry Mould said it was a spell to make you fail. Gwen Lacey said it was for the girls whose fathers had gone. We laughed about it for two years and never once asked her what she meant.

The summer I left, I had a story back with that word beneath the grade and nothing else. I had written about a drowned dog and a lie I told my mother, and I thought Miss Hallam had seen the lie and pitied me for it. I folded the page into my satchel and didn't look at it for thirty years.

When my mother died last spring, I found it tucked in the back of her Bible. Beneath Miss Hallam's word, in my mother's neat hand, someone had written the date I was born. Below that, in pencil so faint I had to tilt it to the window, the teacher had added: Ask her to tell you. She always meant to.