Black and grey Devanagari script tattoo running across a forearm, with a red string bracelet on the wrist against a dark background.

Devanagari script across a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A long line of Devanagari script is tattooed across the forearm in solid black ink with grey shading. The letterforms are bold and flowing, with the strokes joined and some lines thickened and others thinned. A red string bracelet sits on the wrist, and the plain dark background keeps the focus on the lettering.

Lettering Forearm Script Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sign painter came to the fair at Hollin Green with one brush, a tin of lamp black and a line of letters he had copied from his grandmother's prayer cloth. Every town wanted its name painted across the big top, and every town paid in coins that had been warm in someone else's pocket. He worked from the back of the dodgem cars, where the light was good and the ground stayed dry.

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The boy who sold toffee apples watched him for three weeks before he spoke. "What does it say?" he asked. "Hold the pot steady," said the painter. On the sixth week the boy asked again, and the painter put down his brush and said the words went wherever the canvas went, and a man could not read the road he was walking on. The boy thought this was nonsense. He went back to his apples.

In October the fair was caught on the coast road by a storm that tore the big top from its poles and dragged the banner through a ditch of wet clay. The boy found it at dawn, hauled it out and rinsed it in a horse trough. The black letters had held. He carried it to the painter's wagon, and the old man only nodded and tied a length of red thread around the boy's wrist.

"Say it every morning before you eat," the painter said. The boy did, for years, through a dozen fairs and two marriages, without ever learning what it meant. The thread stayed on his wrist until it went grey and frayed to nothing, and by then he could say the whole line without looking.