Fine line black script tattoo of the word explore on the inner forearm, with a blurred hand holding the wrist in the foreground.

Explore script on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close view of the inner forearm showing the word explore written in a flowing, cursive script in black ink. The linework is thin and even, with no shading, and the lettering sits across the forearm near the wrist. The background is a soft grey, and a blurred arm and a dark sleeve sit in the foreground and at the left edge.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Word Script

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

Your mum says you've been practising that word on every envelope in the house, so I'm writing to you in the same spirit. It's gone three in the morning on Ward 7 and the building is making its night noises: a pump ticking somewhere, a call bell going off and being silenced, the lift doors sighing open on nobody. I've got a flask of stewed tea and the last custard cream from the tin Mrs Okafor brought in for the night staff.

Keep reading

Mr Dunmore in bed four can't sleep either. He was a ferryman on the Harwich crossing for thirty-one years, and tonight he asked me for a pencil and the back of a dinner menu. He drew the coastline from memory, every groyne and sandbank, then wrote one word in the corner in the loopy copperplate they taught boys before biros. Explore. I asked if it was a note to himself. He said it was what he'd told his daughter on the quayside the morning she sailed for Halifax, and she'd never once written back to say she'd done it.

He did say she sends a postcard every Christmas, though, each one from a different town, and he's pinned all of them above the bed so the wall looks like a crossing of its own. He handed me the menu and asked me to post it to her, folded, with no note. I said I'd do it on my day off. It's in my tunic pocket now, and I keep touching it like a ticket.

So here's my instruction, love: take the next shift you're offered that's a long way from home, and when you get there, write me something I can't read in one go. Yours in cold tea, Auntie Pam.