Close-up of a fine line black script tattoo reading 'alive' with a thin trailing line, on the inner wrist.

Fine line script 'alive' on a wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black fine line script reads 'alive', with a thin line extending from the left of the word to the right side of the wrist. The linework is even and single-weight, with no shading. The ink is dark and crisp against the skin, and the wrist sits in the centre of the frame over grass, with a can edge visible at the left.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Script Word Line

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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

You hold the chalk the way your father taught you, short between thumb and two fingers, so it won't snap when you press. The board hangs by the lamp room door at Hollin Pit, and every shift the banksman wants a count of who came up and who didn't. Your job is to write the word at the bottom, the one the wives look for before they look for their own men. This morning there's a fall in the north drift and the board has been blank since six.

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Mrs Ridley from Front Street comes up the lane with her shawl over her head and stops at the fence. She doesn't ask you anything. She reads the board the way she reads the paper, left to right, slow, her lips moving. You want to tell her the chalk was damp and smeared. Instead you draw a thin rule beneath the names, a line you learnt from the ledger, and you let it run past the edge of the wood because your hand won't stop at the margin.

At half past eleven the cage rings twice. The men come up grey as the slag heap, coughing, and somebody's brother is carried out on a door. You count them the way you were told, touching each name with the chalk and saying it under your breath. Then you write, and the letters come out loose and joined, a hand nobody taught you, a word that means exactly what it says. Alive. The rule you drew at dawn runs beneath it from the first letter out to the edge of the board, and nobody calls it untidy.