Black brush-script word Explore on a white background, with an arrow running through the letters x and p, shown as a tattoo design with no body placement visible.

Explore script with arrow design

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

The image shows the word Explore written in flowing black brush script, with a tall arrow passing vertically through the x and p. The linework is bold and varied in weight, with tapered strokes and looping capitals and descenders. It is drawn in solid black ink on a plain white background with no shading or other colour.

Lettering Arrow Script Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The atlas came down from the top of the wardrobe the week after Dennis wrote from Southampton, and Mam said nobody was to touch it, so naturally I took it out to the back step and sat with it open across my knees until the light had gone off the wall.

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Somebody had drawn in the margin of the county map. Not Dennis, whose handwriting looked like a row of fence posts, and not Dad, who had never been further than Rhyl and back on the charabanc. It was an arrow in faded blue ink, starting at our little dot of Haddleby and running off the edge of the page, and beside its feathered end someone had written one word in looping capitals: Explore. I turned the atlas over as if the back of the paper might tell me who had been brave enough to write it.

At the post office counter the next morning I weighed letters on the brass scales and read the postcards I shouldn't have. Mrs Pollard caught me at it twice. "The world does not come to the counter, Ruth," she said, but she slid a sheet of blue airmail paper across to me anyway. I wrote to Dennis in the back room with the kettle ticking, asking what the sea did at night and whether anyone in Southampton had ever heard of Haddleby.

I posted it myself before my shift ended and stood at the kerb while the van took the sacks away, watching it turn past the church and head east. Then I went home, found Dad's pencil in the drawer, and drew the arrow again on the inside of my wrist so I would remember which way it pointed.