Close-up of a small black fine line script word, timshel, on the forearm of a person wearing a striped top.

Fine line script word on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small black script word sits across the forearm, written in a thin, continuous monoline with a slightly slanted, handwritten feel. The skin is lit evenly and the lettering is sharp and fully legible. A blurred red shape and a striped fabric sleeve fill the right side and background, with no face visible.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Script Word Handwriting

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pencil kept slipping on the damp paper, so I wrote the word three times before Mr Ogilvie would accept it. He stood at the chart table with his oilskin dripping onto the tide tables and watched my hand as though the letters might climb off the page if he looked away. "Slant it like you mean it, Nell," he said. "It's going on skin, not a bill of lading."

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The word was one his mother used to call him in from the quay at dusk, a single breath of a thing that carried over the harbour wall. He had never once written it down. Now he wanted it fixed in the same looping hand she used on the Christmas tags, so that whichever port took him next would still know whose call it was. I traced it again while the galley stove ticked and the kettle sulked on the hob, and the cook pretended not to listen.

When the Cormorant docked at Leith in March, a man in a brass-buttoned coat was waiting on the pier with a satchel and a tin of ink. He read the word aloud, badly, and said it would take the better part of an afternoon. Ogilvie laughed, pushed back his cuff, and told him to mind the place where the line thinned, because his mother's hand had always been lighter at the end of a word.

I kept the pencil stub. Every evening since, when the harbour bell goes, I think of him at the rail with the ink still drying, turning his head towards a voice that was never going to call him in again, and I find I can still hear it.