Close view of a hand with small finger lettering and a cross, pointing at a white t-shirt, with a black-grey upper arm tattoo and red script on the arm.

Finger lettering and red script on upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A close photograph of a hand with small black lettering on the middle finger and a black cross on the little finger, plus a silver ring. The forearm and upper arm show a dark shaded tattoo at the top of the arm, a bold black block pattern, and red script below it, with the shirt print of a line-drawn face and hand in the background. The colour is mostly black and grey with red accents, and the framing is cropped tight on the arm and hand.

Lettering Upper arm Hand Lettering Script Cross Finger tattoo Leaf Ring

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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 third time Ray Dobbin came in asking for his name in red, I told him paint was cheap and skin was not. He laughed and laid his hand flat on my counter, fingers spread, as if the wood might want a signature too. I had been lettering shopfronts on Mill Street for thirty-one years, and I knew the difference between a sign that would weather and a sign that would not.

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Ray wanted bars, stacked black like the shutters the lads pull down on Fenner Lane at six. He wanted a cross on one finger for his mother, who had kept the chapel keys for forty years, and a leaf pressed flat beneath the bars like a bookmark. Nobody in my trade asks for a leaf. I drew it anyway in pencil on tracing paper, and he folded the sheet into his jacket and said he would come back when his hand had finished being a hand.

He came back at Christmas with the name done. It was red and backwards, the way a sign reads from inside the glass, and beneath it were the little figures he had inked on his knuckle with a biro nib. I held my window up to the light and read it the right way round. He had been practising my letters on the fascia outside every night for a month, climbing my ladder with a pot of Venetian red while the town slept. Only the woman at the bakery had seen him, and she had waved.

I took my own name down from the fascia that week and let his stand. Some lettering only looks honest when someone else is holding the brush.