Fine line black script reading courage, dear heart, running diagonally along the inner wrist and lower forearm.

Courage, dear heart script on a wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a forearm and wrist with the words courage, dear heart written in thin, cursive black script. The lettering runs diagonally from the wrist upwards, with even, delicate linework and solid black ink. The plain light grey background keeps the focus on the tattoo.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Script Word Courage Heart

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 ink is almost dry when the messenger comes up the Via Appia, so you write the last line crooked against the edge of the papyrus and hope the boy from the harbour reads it kindly. Your hand is cramped from three nights of copying the harbour manifests for Lucius, and the lamp has gone to a bead of oil that smokes whenever you breathe on it.

Keep reading

Your sister would have laughed at the letter. She always said you wrote like a man walking a ship through a storm, every stroke leaning into the wind. Still, you set down the words you have said to her a hundred times across the kitchen table: courage, dear heart. You lift them in a long, looping line that climbs the margin, thin as a fishing line, because the fever has not left her chest and you want the words to look light enough to carry.

The messenger tucks the scroll under his tunic against the rain. You watch him go down the hill until the olive trees swallow him, and then you turn back to the manifests, because the ships do not wait for grief, and neither, it seems, does Lucius.

Three days later the reply comes, in her own unsteady hand, one word across the top: Yes. Then below it, smaller, as if she had to stop to breathe: I am still here.