Black fine line script lettering on the inner upper arm, with a person in a black and white striped top beside it.

Fine line script word on upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A single word written in thin, continuous black script runs diagonally across the inner upper arm. The linework is even and uninterrupted, with tapered loops and a long flowing stroke at the top. The skin is pale and the background is soft and neutral, with the edge of a striped top visible on the right.

Fine line Lettering Upper arm Script Word Handwriting

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer, child, the fire has done what it can and the wind is coming off the fells again. You want the story of Brother Anselm and the word he was not allowed to write. He was the finest hand in the scriptorium at Saint Oswin's, able to carry one line of ink across a whole page without lifting his pen. The abbot admired that. He did not admire the habit Anselm had of drawing a small word in the margin each evening, then scraping it off with his knife before the bell.

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The novice Ebba found it, because novices always sweep under the desks. She tilted a psalter to the window and read it letter by letter: the tall stroke of the l rising like a reed, the w looping back on itself as if unsure where to go. It said wild. A monk had no business with such a word, and Ebba, who had never been anywhere without walls, found she was thinking about it all through Vespers.

Anselm saw her looking and did not scold. He took the psalter, dipped his pen, and wrote the word again beside her, the nib never leaving the vellum, until the line ran off the edge and down the table. 'The river does not stop at the bank,' he said. 'Go as far as the ink goes.' She did not take the pen. She was fourteen and frightened, and she went to the office.

Anselm left at Candlemas with a satchel of brushes and was never seen again. The psalter is still on the shelf in the east room. Tilt it to the window and the word is there under the grain of the vellum, one unbroken stroke running from the margin off the edge of the world. Ebba kept that psalter until she died. She said it was the only thing she ever saw a man make without stopping.