Close up of the word explore in fine black script lettering on the inner forearm of a person wearing a black top.

Explore script tattoo on an inner forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph of the word explore written in thin black cursive script on the inner forearm, with the wrist and hand of a second person holding the arm at the right edge. The linework is fine and even, with a single solid ink tone and no shading. The background is a soft grey blur, and the tattoo sits in sharp focus at the centre of the frame.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Script Word

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

The chart table on the Marigold has a scratch in its oak that catches the lamp light every time the swell lifts the bow, and you have learned to rest your wrist just so the ink does not drag. Captain Ferrar wants the southern coast fair-copied before the wind turns, every inlet and shoal named in a hand he can read without his spectacles. You are nineteen, and your pen is the only steady thing aboard in a seaway.

Keep reading

Three weeks out from Falmouth the old charts ran out. The last sheet showed a coastline drawn by someone who had never set foot on it, a dotted line where the water simply stopped being known. Ferrar tapped it with his pipe stem and said nothing for a long time. Then he took the pen from your fingers, dipped it, and wrote one word in the margin in that loose, slanting script of his, the letters trailing into a flourish as if they wanted to keep going past the edge of the paper.

Explore, it said. You took it for an order until he laughed, the first real laugh you had heard from him, and told you his father had written the same word on the back of every chart he ever drew. Nobody had ever told either of them what to find. The word was only a promise that there was still something to see.

When the coast finally rose grey out of the haze, you were the one who spotted the break in the cliffs. You inked the channel into the sheet with a fine, clean line, and beneath it, small enough that only you would ever know, you wrote the word again and let the tail of the last letter run out to the edge of the paper.