Close-up of a black handwritten script tattoo reading 'this is what a feminist looks like' across pale skin.

Handwritten script quote tattoo

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows a handwritten script tattoo set over three lines of text, reading 'this is what a feminist looks like'. The lettering is black with fine, even linework and a loose, slanted hand. The skin is pale and the shot is close and slightly warm in tone, with fabric visible at the edge of the frame.

Lettering Other Quote Script Handwriting Text

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 press broke on the Thursday, so Mr Halloran sent me to the back bench with a pot of ink and a sheet of good card. 'Write it out fair,' he said, 'and make it look like a lady wrote it, because a lady is who'll be standing under it.' The words came from Dora Pell, who ran the laundry on Cross Street and had been turned away from the vote meeting three times that winter.

Keep reading

I wrote it slanting, the way my mother taught me, with the loops left open so they looked tired from a long day. This is what a feminist looks like, I wrote, and then the pen went dry and I had to dip again, and I wondered whether anyone would ever read it as more than a joke. Dora came in for it with her sleeves still wet from the mangle. She read it with her lips moving and said the f was standing too tall for the rest of the line.

Nobody laughed at the meeting. The men at the back did, then stopped, because forty women stood up in their Sunday coats and held the card between them, and the sheet was so wide that the hall lamps threw our shadows across the wall in a row. Someone asked who had done the lettering. Dora pointed at me without looking round.

I still have the spoiled sheet. The first attempt is folded in my apron pocket, where it has been since that week. The ink bled at the edges, so the tall letters have a soft blur, like breath on a window. Nobody has ever asked me to fix it.