Forearm tattoo of a black blackletter letter with blue-grey shading above a black script quote reading just a sign to remind me tomorrow is worth the fight.

Blackletter letter and quote on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A close photo of a forearm showing a bold black blackletter capital with soft blue-grey shading around it near the elbow. Below it, a black script line runs down the arm, reading just a sign to remind me tomorrow is worth the fight. The skin is pale, with a red patterned blanket and a grey sofa in the background, and glare shows on the skin.

Lettering Forearm Letter Blackletter Script Quote Smoke

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dennis Hobb had been dead a fortnight when his widow brought the gold leaf round to the workshop on Pellon Lane, wrapped in a tea towel as if it might bruise. She wanted the old blackletter capital on the boarding above the chapel door brought back, the one that had weathered to a grey smudge. Ruth Cawley took the tin from her and said nothing about the price, because the widow had already settled it with a look.

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Ruth painted the letter on a Tuesday, with the gas fire ticking and the wireless low on the shipping forecast. Blackletter was all angles and hard stops, a letter built from fence posts, so she laid the black first and then let a thin wash of blue-grey dust feather out from its edges until it seemed to smoke a little in the cold. Her father had taught her that the shadow mattered more than the stroke. "Anyone can make a letter stand up," he used to say. "Make it look like it's been standing in weather."

The widow came back on Friday with a scrap of paper, a line in Dennis's careful hand. She wanted it running beneath the capital in the same copperplate script the chapel had used for its notices. Ruth read it twice, then said it was a long sentence for a small board, and the widow said Dennis had written it on the back of every invoice he ever sent, so people would know he meant it.

Ruth set the lettering that evening, slow and even, one word at a time. When she climbed down the ladder, the streetlamp had come on and caught the blue smoke around the black capital, and the whole board looked as though it had been standing out in the weather for a hundred years.