Back view of a woman in a black top showing a small black fine line script tattoo on her upper arm, near the shoulder.

Fine line script tattoo on upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A close view of a woman's bare back and upper arm, with a small black script tattoo running vertically along the outer arm below the shoulder. The linework is thin and even, with no shading, and the ink is a dark grey-black against the skin. The plain dark dress and soft, neutral background keep the focus on the tattoo.

Fine line Lettering Upper arm Script Cursive 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 ink pad at Halvick Crossing dried out in the second week of October, so for three days I wrote every entry by hand, the way my father taught me, letters leaning forward as if they were in a hurry to leave the page. Nobody minds a clerk's handwriting at a border, provided it is legible. Mine was. The trouble was the envelope that came through the morning post with no return address and one word run along its back in fine black cursive, rising and falling like a fence line in fog.

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I could not read it. I held it to the lamp and tilted it, and the loops closed over each other until the word was half a sentence and half a bird. I put it in the drawer under the spare seals and told myself it was somebody's joke, or a lost thing that would turn up on its own. Things at the crossing usually do, one way or another, under a bench in the waiting room or in the cab of a lorry that has gone home without its driver's gloves.

It came back in December. A man in a damp wool coat leaned on my counter and asked, not quite looking at me, whether the post had been kept. When I opened the drawer he nodded at the envelope before I had turned it over, as though checking a signature. He said it was what his mother called him when he came in late from the river, and that nobody had said it aloud since she died. I asked him to spell it. He spelled it, slowly, and it was the same word I had been squinting at all autumn, and it was so ordinary I nearly laughed, the sort of word you could find on a bakery sign in any town.

I stamped his papers and let him through. Then I held the envelope over the bin, changed my mind, and put it back in the drawer under the seals, where it could keep its shape.