Black script lettering reading Gabriel in a fine line lettering style, placed on the upper arm.

Gabriel in script on upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of the name Gabriel written in flowing black script across the upper arm. The letters have a looping, calligraphic form with a decorative swash on the initial G and a long stroke through the final l. The ink is solid black on a light skin tone, and the background is softly out of focus.

Lettering Upper arm Name Script Calligraphy

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

The snow had shut the road over the moor by four o'clock, and by six the landlady of the Coach and Lamp had given you the back room with the cracked washbasin and a pen that skipped. You were meant to be copying the parish register for a solicitor in Halifax, but the ink kept beading on the nib, so you practised instead, the way your mother taught you: long loops, then the fat downstroke, then the hairline back.

Keep reading

On the third page of the old ledger a name had been written by someone who loved flourishes. Gabriel Hale, 1871, the G curling back on itself like a hand shielding a match. The landlady said he had gone out in a storm the winter before last to fetch a doctor and had not come back, and that nobody had signed the book in that hand since. You traced the swash with your little finger and felt the grooves the steel had pressed into the paper.

Near midnight the door rattled. A boy stood in the drift with a lantern, asking whether the inn had room for a traveller who could no longer feel his feet. You brought him to the fire, and when you pressed a cup of hot milk into his bruised hands he looked at the open ledger and said, "That's my grandfather's name." He spelled it for you, letter by letter, and you saw that he did not know the flourish on the G had been his grandfather's own.

You dipped the nib again and wrote the boy's name beneath the old one, letting the last l run out into a long stroke across the margin, the same stroke the wind was making against the window. By morning the lane was clear, and the ink had dried into a line that leaned the way his grandfather's had.