Black fine-line script quote tattoo running along a forearm, with the arm resting on a grey ledge against a dark wall.

Handwritten script quote on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A forearm is photographed from the side, with several lines of black cursive script running diagonally up the arm. The thin, even linework is in dark grey-black ink on pale skin, and the text is partly hard to read where it curves around the arm. The plain grey wall and dark edge of the frame keep the focus on the tattoo.

Lettering Fine line Forearm Script Handwritten text Quote

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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

Margaret Pryce has kept the envelope for thirty-one years, and she slides it across the trestle table at the Ashbourne Lodge reunion as if it were a menu. You recognise the handwriting before you recognise her: the looped capitals from the back row of chemistry, the way the g still dives below the line. Inside is a folded sheet of thin lined paper, and on it, in pencil, a line you wrote at sixteen and never sent: I love you at certain times, and the rest is meant between the lines.

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She laughs at your face. "You were always going to be dramatic about it," she says, and she tells you about the pub car park in Stafford, the rain, the way you said nothing at all for ten minutes and then gave her a lift home in a borrowed car that smelled of wet dog. You don't remember the dog. You remember the silence, which you had mistaken for courage.

Around you the hall fills with people who have become their parents: a dentist with a careful combover, a vet who has clearly been crying in the toilets, a man who sells conservatories and wants everyone to know it. The DJ plays something from 1991. Someone asks whether you still write poems, and you say no in a voice that is almost true.

Margaret taps the paper. "Read the rest," she says. You do. The words run on past the crease, down into the margin where you had been too shy to finish, and the last line is blank except for a single pencilled full stop, which is the only honest thing you wrote that year. You fold it, put it in your breast pocket, and go to find her a drink, because some sentences deserve a second go, and this one, you decide, is still the right length.