Close view of a thin black script lettering tattoo on the upper arm, partly cut off at the edge of the frame, with a person in a black and white striped top.

Fine line script on the upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph of a thin black script tattoo running across the upper arm, with the lettering cropped at the right edge so only part of the words is visible. The linework is fine and even, with no shading, and the ink reads as a dark grey-black against the skin. The frame also shows a black and white striped top and loose hair, with the lower face and most of the person left out of view.

Fine line Lettering Upper arm Script Word

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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

The queue at the Calais terminal has been moving at the speed of a dropped coin for three hours, and the man ahead of you keeps reading the same page of a paperback without turning it. You have a letter in your coat pocket, folded in quarters, its pencil already smudged from handling. Your aunt wrote it because the good pen had dried up in the kitchen drawer, and the last line, the one you keep returning to, is the only part you have ever been able to say aloud.

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At the booth the officer takes your passport and asks where you are going and for how long. You tell him Margate, a week, a cousin's spare room with a window over the harbour wall. He turns the pages slowly and holds the photograph up to the light as if it might change its mind. Behind him a radio murmurs about tailbacks on the A20, and a kettle clicks somewhere out of sight. You think of the lines your aunt copied out for you from an old songbook, the ones that began with nothing and ended somewhere you could not follow.

He stamps the page. The sound is small and final, like a full stop put in the wrong place. Next, he says, though nobody is standing there yet, and you walk out into the grey light of the other side with the letter pressed against your ribs. Behind the glass the queue shuffles on without you, and for a moment you feel the weight of what she told you: keep going, even when the words run out at the edge of the page.