Black and grey tattoo on a forearm of a framed, Polaroid-style drawing of a house with a fence, with flourished script lettering below it.

Framed house drawing and script on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo on the outer forearm shows a framed picture resembling a Polaroid print, containing a shaded drawing of a small house with a porch, fence and tree. Below it, flowing script lettering with decorative swirls runs down towards the wrist. The photo is warm-toned and shows a beer bottle and a hand at the left edge.

Lettering Realism Forearm House Tree Script Lettering Flourish Swirl

Find an artist for this

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

Nell had been sorting her late aunt's cupboards for three days when she found the photograph wedged behind a tin of custard powder. It showed a white clapboard house with a porch, a picket fence leaning a little towards the road, and a tree whose branches had been scratched in with a biro by someone still learning the trick. On the back, in pencil, someone had written: don't wait up, it's all right.

Keep reading

Her aunt had never mentioned a house like that. The bills came to a flat above a chemist's in Hull, and the only garden anyone in the family remembered was a strip of gravel and a washing line. Nell carried the picture to the kitchen table, where the radio was murmuring the shipping forecast, and turned it over and over until the corners went soft.

On Thursday the man from the removal firm, a patient Scot called Dougal, asked whether the box on the stairs was for keeping or skipping. She said keep, then changed her mind, then sat down beside it with the box between her knees. Inside was a bundle of letters, all posted from a village called Tarrow Bay, all signed with a single initial, and all saying the same thing in slightly different words: the porch light is on.

She drove to Tarrow Bay the next Saturday with the photograph on the passenger seat. The house was there, fence and tree and all, with a lamp burning in the front window at four in the afternoon. A woman in a green cardigan opened the door, looked at the Polaroid, and laughed so suddenly that she had to hold onto the frame. "Your aunt always did keep things," she said, "even the things that were meant to go."