Fine line black script tattoo on the inner forearm of a hand raised against a grey tiled floor, in an angular style that appears to be Tengwar.

Elvish script tattoo on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A line of black script runs along the inner forearm, reading from the wrist towards the elbow. The linework is fine and even, with the letterforms appearing to be Tengwar, an elvish writing system from Tolkien's fiction. The ink is solid black on pale skin, and the photo is taken from above against a dark grey tiled floor.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Script Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pencil guidelines were ruled in Auntie Maud's kitchen on the Friday before the wedding, while the kettle ticked on the hob and the radio talked about rain. She wanted the place cards in elvish, all twenty-six of them, and she wanted them done by hand. 'Nobody reads these,' she said, sliding a library book across the table. 'They just admire the hand.' The book was eleven years overdue and smelled of someone else's toast.

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I worked through it letter by letter. The bowls and long stems came easily once I stopped trying to make them pretty, but the small marks that sit above certain letters were the hardest, a tilt of the nib that you cannot rush. By Sunday night I had a stack of ivory cards that looked like a tidy row of railings in a foreign town. Each one carried a guest's name and, underneath, a line I had copied from a verse in the book, because Maud said it sounded like something you would say at a door.

At the reception, Nell's grandmother, Irene, who had taught infants in Leeds for forty years, picked up her card and held it under the lamp. She traced the first word with a finger that did not shake. 'That's not a verse,' she said. 'That's the one for when someone comes home from a long way off and the house has kept a light on.' She looked at me over her glasses. 'Somebody was thinking of you when they chose it, love.'

I had not chosen it. I had picked it because it was the prettiest line in the book. Irene handed the card back, and for the rest of the evening I kept catching sight of those little strokes above the letters, like rain starting on a window, and wondering who else in that room had been handed a message they never asked for.