Black and grey photograph of a fine cursive script tattoo running along the inner upper arm, with the person's face not shown.

Cursive script quote along an upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A single line of cursive script runs diagonally along the inner upper arm, from near the armpit towards the elbow. The thin, even linework is dark black ink on pale skin, and the shot is black and grey with soft, low-contrast lighting. The lettering is partly legible, and the person's dark top and bare shoulder sit in the lower and right parts of the frame.

Lettering Upper arm Script Quote

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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

The ink had thickened in the pot overnight, so I loosened it with rainwater and tried the nib again on the back of a spoiled ledger, where nobody would think to look. Walter Haskett had brought his wife's words to me folded soft as cloth, and he wanted them copied fair before the mason carted the stone down from the market town. I am the only one in Hollin's End who can make a proper cursive, so the job came to me, as things do.

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The words were hers, written in pencil on the flyleaf of a hymnal. She had a slant that leaned into the wind, and every capital looped back on itself like a dog turning before it lies down. I practised her loops for three evenings until my wrist ached, then sat under the lamp with the beeches knocking at the glass and wrote the line straight through without lifting the pen.

When I came to the last phrase my hand stopped of its own accord. The words were plain enough. They simply said what a woman might say if she had loved a man so long she no longer knew where her own wanting ended. I blotted the page twice and wrote it again, slower, so the ink sat even along the baseline.

Walter came for it on Thursday with his cap in his fists. He could not read the lettering, only the shape of it, and he ran his thumb along the loops as if he were feeling for a pulse. "Leave it as it is," he said. "Let the mason copy the hand, not the sense."

They set the stone the following week under the oldest beech, the line running across the grey granite with the H tilted like a bird on a wire, and I have walked past it every morning since.