Two wrists on sand showing gold script lettering reading bride's babes with a small heart, in a lettering style on the forearm near the wrist.

Gold script bride's babes on wrists

Lettering · Forearm · Colour · Photo

Two wrists are raised against a sandy beach, each carrying the same gold script lettering that reads bride's babes with a small heart beside the word babes. The strokes are brush-like and flowing, rendered in a single metallic gold ink with no shading. The warm, sunlit composition places the wrists centrally, with pink nail polish and a ring visible on the hands above.

Lettering Forearm Heart Script Hand Beach

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody had read the small print on the box, which is how we ended up on Chesil Beach at nine in the morning with fourteen sheets of gold transfers, a sponge, and a flask of tea that tasted of the bag. The instructions said to press firmly for thirty seconds and peel the backing slowly, like a plaster, though Priya insisted it was more like unwrapping a sweet. Nobody believed her. Somebody had already lost a sheet to the wind, and it was now stuck to a windbreak three hundred yards away, reading bride's bab.

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We did the wrists first because that was where the photographs would go. Helen held her arms out like a surgeon waiting for gloves and told us she wanted the lettering crooked, because straight was for solicitors. The brush strokes came up thin and bright in the low sun, and for a minute the whole beach seemed to be looking at us, which was a lie, because only a Labrador was watching and it had no opinion on calligraphy. The heart beside the second word came out sideways, a small lopsided thing that made Helen laugh until she had to sit down on the shingle.

Then came the argument, which lasted roughly the length of the tea. Bev wanted 'bride's crew'. Priya wanted 'bride's bodyguards'. Helen said that if anybody put a word on her skin she had not personally approved, she would make them walk back to Bristol. In the end the word stayed, the heart stayed sideways, and nobody could agree which of us had chosen it.

By Sunday the gold had worn to a shine that only showed when you turned your wrist to the light. On the train home Helen kept checking it, tilting her arm past the window, and when the ticket inspector asked what the words meant she said they meant we were not finished yet. He nodded as if that were a sensible answer from a woman with sand in her hair.