Black ink tattoo of the handwritten phrase 'my only sunshine' beside a drawn sun with rays, on the inner wrist and forearm, with a silver rhinestone bangle above.

Handwritten 'my only sunshine' with sun on wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows the handwritten words 'my only sunshine' in black ink, with 'my only' on the upper line and 'sunshine' below. A simple sun with curved rays is drawn to the left of the lettering. The linework is even and monoline in black with no grey shading, and the photograph is taken close up against a plain skin background with a silver bangle across the top.

Lettering Forearm Sun Sunshine Script

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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

Sit closer, you lot, and mind the sawdust, it gets in everything. This was the autumn the Pell Brothers' Hippodrome came limping into Kettering with one elephant, two ponies and a tent that let the rain in over the trapeze. Old Jack Pell stood in the mud with the bank's letter folded in his waistcoat, and he would not look at it.

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His daughter Nell was nine and cared nothing for letters. Her mother had drawn a sun on the back of an old playbill, a sun with curled rays, and beside it, in that looping hand, she had written the words from the song everyone hums when the lamps go low. My only sunshine. Nell took a pen from the ticket box and copied them onto her own arm, pressing so hard the nib split the paper, so that every morning her father had to look at them.

Pell sold the elephant in spring. He sold the ponies in summer. On the last night in September the tent was half empty and the clowns were crying into their greasepaint, and Nell walked out on the high wire in her father's old boots because the rigger had gone home with fever. She didn't fall. She stood at the middle of that wire with her arms out, and the few people left looked up at the one thing in that tent still burning bright.

The bank never got the tent. Jack Pell kept it for forty years, and every time it rained he said the same thing: a sun only needs one person under it. Nell's writing faded off the paper long before the canvas did, but she never once took that pen out of her pocket.