Close photo of a fine line cursive script tattoo in black ink running along the side of a middle finger, resting on a grey countertop.

Cursive word tattoo on middle finger

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A hand rests palm down on a dark grey countertop, with a small black cursive script tattoo running along the middle finger. The script is thin and delicate, and the letterforms are too small to read clearly at this resolution. The ink is solid black with no colour, and the soft, slightly warm lighting shows a plain background with a metal object at the top edge.

Fine line Lettering Hand Script Word Cursive Finger

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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

Sit yourself by the stove, you're letting the sea in with that door. Aye, the word. Everybody in Porthkennack has a theory about it, and not one of them has ever got it right, because Josiah Penrose never let anyone read it twice.

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Josiah wrote letters for the fishermen's wives, the ones who couldn't hold a pen without it shaking. He wrote in a copperplate so fine a grown man would squint at it, and every week the words got smaller, as if he were trying to fit the whole parish onto one sheet. When the ink ran low he bought more from the chandler's, and when that ran low he took to pricking the word into his own finger with a sewing needle, a dab at a time, so he'd always have it to hand.

The winter the Morwenna went down off the Lizard, his wife Ruth came to the quay every morning for a month, asking him for a letter she could read herself. He told her he couldn't write one she'd understand. Then one grey morning he walked out past the breakwater with the tide making and never came back, and that finger was the last of his handwriting the village ever saw.

Ruth went through the parish register that spring and found a line in his hand she could make out: their boy's name in the margin, and beside it one small word, the same one that's on his finger. She has never told anyone what it says. The sea has the rest of it now, and the sea is a poor reader, which is why it keeps everything.