Fine-line French script tattoo running along the upper arm of a person lying on a bed, with a blue-grey feather tattoo near the elbow.

French script and feather tattoos on an arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A person lies on white bedding in a loose light top, with dark hair covering the face and one arm raised. A thin black script line of French text runs down the upper arm, and a blue-grey feather with soft shading sits on the forearm near the elbow. The linework is delicate and the composition is close and soft, with mostly neutral tones and a small amount of blue ink.

Lettering Fine line Upper arm Forearm Script Text Quote Feather Arm Bed Hair

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wind off the Humber had teeth that October, and Dad's canvas kept lifting as if it wanted to leave without us. We were pitched on the car park behind the Co-op in Goole with three rides, a hook-a-duck and a helter-skelter that groaned every time someone shrieked on the top step. I was nine and certain I would find the lost ticket money in the generator's oily tray.

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Our neighbour on the field was Maurice, who ran the coconut shy from a caravan painted the colour of weak tea. Over his door he had lettered the line his father taught him, Les temps sont durs pour les rêveurs. When I asked what it meant, he said hard times for dreamers, then pressed a tin feather into my hand and told me to stop pulling faces at the customers.

The generator died the night we were due to close. The lights went out along the helter-skelter with a girl stuck halfway down, screaming for her mum. Maurice went up the slide in the dark with a torch clamped in his teeth while I held the ladder steady and counted the rungs under my breath, the way he had taught me to count coconuts.

Next morning the field was empty, the caravans gone east on the A614. Dad found the tin feather pushed into the ticket box, which I had not put there, and he said nothing about it. I still have it, painted blue-grey like the sky over the river that week, and I keep it in my pocket on wet days when the lights go out.