Fine line black script tattoo of a short handwritten phrase running diagonally along a forearm, beside a purple and yellow floral fabric.

Fine line script on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A thin, handwritten line of black script runs diagonally up a bare forearm, with small loops and a few words that are only partly legible in this photograph. The linework is delicate and even, and the ink is solid black with no shading or colour. The arm fills the left of the frame, and a bold purple and yellow floral print fabric sits against the right side.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Script Handwritten text Quote

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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 down, you, and mind the gas lamp, it spits when the wind comes off the canal. I'll tell you about the letter Nell Harrigan left in the till drawer of my uncle's shop on Water Lane in the spring of nineteen twelve. She never pawned it, not properly. She folded it in four, set it on the brass scales as if it weighed something, and walked out before anyone could ask what it was worth.

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My uncle Ezra read it aloud to me because his eyes had gone by then. It was written in a hurry, the ink blotted where the nib had dragged. I never asked you for the moon, it said. I never gave you my name to keep. I refuse to be the one who waits behind the counter. Then a line that trailed off into a loop, as though she had lifted the pen, thought better of it, and set it down again.

The letter was meant for a bargeman called Tom Brennan, who had been gone since Michaelmas. The lamplighter swore he saw Tom at the lock on Dock Street on a Thursday night, carrying a carpetbag, but Tom's mother swore he had never left the cottage. I believed the lamplighter. Lamplighters see everything from the top of a ladder, and nobody ever thinks to look up at them.

We kept the letter under the pledge tickets for forty years. Nobody came to redeem it. Last winter a girl came in out of the sleet asking for a stamp, and when I opened the drawer she read the first line and went very still. Then she laughed, folded it small, and put it in her coat without paying a penny. I still have the scales. Nothing on them has weighed quite the same since.