Black ink lettering tattoo on a forearm, with the words my best friend, my lover and my husband arranged around a heart outline and a script word in the centre.

Heart lettering tattoo on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a heart shape formed by black lettering on the inner forearm. The phrases my best friend, my lover and my husband run around the outline, with a single word in cursive script sitting in the centre of the heart. The lines are clean and even, the ink is solid black, and the tattoo fills most of the frame against plain pale skin.

Lettering Forearm Heart Lettering Script Text

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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

Ivo Lark had lettered lorry doors at the Carrick Bridge crossing for thirty-one years, and he had never been asked for a heart. The woman who came to the yard that Tuesday carried a folded sheet of lined paper in one fist and a tin of gloss enamel in the other, as if she expected him to refuse the job and wanted to be ready to leave. Her husband's van stood under the lean-to, its driver's door still dented from a reversing accident in March.

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"Round the edge," she said, and unfolded the paper on the bonnet. The words were written three times over in different pens, crossed out and rewritten. My best friend. My lover. My husband. The name in the middle was Allan, and she had underlined it twice. "He never wrote anything down in his life. So these are mine. Put them in that order. He'd want the friend first, because that's how it started, at the Co-op with a trolley with one wonky wheel."

Ivo borrowed a length of string and a nail from the workbench and struck a true circle on the door panel, then cut the heart from the bottom of it with a wooden batten. He worked the phrases in capitals, spacing each dot the way his father had taught him, the stops rising and falling like small birds on a wire. The cursive name he saved for last. It took him most of the afternoon, and twice a lorry driver leaned out of his cab to ask whether the van was for sale.

When the last loop of the A dried, she came round the side of the lean-to and stood with her hand on the cold enamel. Neither of them said anything for a while. Then she took a pencil from behind her ear, wrote a small tick on the back of her paper, and folded it back into her pocket, the list finished.