Fine line black script lettering in French across a forearm, with a silver bracelet and a vintage map behind.

Handwritten French script on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A handwritten French phrase is tattooed in thin black script across the inner forearm. The linework is fine and even, with no shading, and the ink sits in a slight diagonal along the arm. The skin tone, a silver bracelet with a black cord, and a pale vintage map beneath the arm sit around the tattoo.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Script Phrase Handwriting Quote French text Bracelet Map

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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 lost-property box on Ward Nine holds a street map of a town you have never visited, folded so often it feels like cloth. A porter who retired last spring left it behind, and nobody else on nights ever opens the box. You do. In the margin, in pencil, someone has written a slanting French line: je suis farouche. Nobody on the ward reads French, so at three in the morning you carry the map to the kettle room and read the words aloud to the humming fridge.

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Farouche, you decide, means shy, or wild, or the kind of wary that will not come to a hand. You think of the woman in bay four who has not spoken since Tuesday and keeps her left wrist turned to the wall. You trace the streets with a biro: a church, a canal, a row of terraces marked with tiny crosses. Beside one cross someone has drawn a small bird and then scored it out so hard the paper has torn.

At half four the call bell goes for bay four. The woman is sitting up, looking at your badge as though it is a word she half remembers. You ask, gently, whether she knows where the canal runs. She taps the blanket where the map would be, and says a street name in an accent you cannot place. You say it back wrong. She laughs, a small rusty sound, and for a minute the ward is only two people and a town neither of you has ever walked.

When the sun comes up over the car park you fold the map along its old creases and put it back in the box. First you copy the French line onto the inside of your own wrist in biro, just to have it somewhere you can see it. By the time the day staff arrive the letters have blurred into a grey bruise, and you still cannot tell whether the wild thing was the bird or the woman who would not turn her arm.