Black ink lettering tattoo of the word family inside an infinity symbol with a small heart, on a forearm.

Family script in an infinity loop on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows the word family in cursive script running through a large infinity symbol, with curled swirl ends and a small outlined heart at the lower loop. The linework is clean and dark, with solid black strokes shading the left-hand loop of the infinity symbol. The forearm sits in the centre of the frame against a plain indoor background of tiled floor and a wooden chair.

Lettering Forearm Infinity Family Heart Script Swirl

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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

Sit closer, the cold comes in under the canvas this time of year, and I have only the one story left in my pocket. Mind the sawdust. It gets into everything, the way the Halloran Brothers' show got into this town and never quite left. Forty years they worked the one ring, and the last winter they were still stitching sequins back onto the costumes by hand.

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Ada Halloran had a wire strung between the two poles in the old figure of eight, the loop her grandmother said was the sign for forever lying down on its side. She walked it every night at nine, one foot, then the other, crossing where the two halves met. The crowds thinned each season like hair on a clown's head. By that last spring there were nine people on the benches, and one of them was a boy who had come in out of the rain and would not stop crying.

Her brother Tomas wanted to sell the wire and the poles to a scrap man from Leeds. He said family was a thing you could carry in a suitcase and leave behind in a boarding house. Ada said nothing. She went out to the crossing instead, stood with her arms wide, and kept still until the boy stopped crying to watch her. Then she called across the empty benches that the wire would hold one more night, and if it held, they would keep going, and nobody need pay a penny to see it.

On the final night the boy's mother came back with the money in a biscuit tin, and the whole family stood under the lamps, eleven of them, passing the tin from hand to hand like a loaf of bread. Tomas took the scrap man's card from his coat and tore it in half. Ada walked the wire once more, slow, round the figure of eight, and the banner stitched above the entrance still reads FAMILY, with a little red heart tucked beneath it where the thread ran out. Now the lamps are going down, so mind the step on your way out.