Fine line black lettering tattoo forming a heart outline on the inner forearm, with the words set along the curve of the heart.

Heart outline of lettering on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A single heart outline is formed entirely from lines of small, neat black lettering that follow its curve. The linework is fine and even, and the ink is a crisp dark blue-black with no shading. The tattoo sits near the centre of the frame on pale skin, with a patterned sofa and denim shorts behind it.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Heart Lettering 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

The shop window on Harbour Road had to be finished before the first frost, and Mrs Okonedo would not have it straight. Straight lines, she said, looked like instructions. So I pinned a loop of string to two nails, swept a heart out in chalk, and set my brush to the words she had copied onto a card in pencil that had been rubbed out and written again.

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I worked small, each letter leaning into the curve so that the lettering at the point had to be tighter than at the top. My brush was a number two sable and the paint was enamel, a blue so dark it looked black until the light came through the glass. Halfway round the left side the paint ran, and I had to scrape the whole stretch back to bare glass and begin again from the top. Mrs Okonedo watched from the pavement with a cup of tea going cold in her hand.

She told me the words came from a letter her husband had written to their son before the boy went to sea, and that the son had kept it folded in his wallet for twenty years. She didn't say whether the boy had come home. She only said that Ray had planted a pear tree in the back garden the week the letter arrived, and that it had never fruited properly, which he blamed on the soil.

When the last letter dried I asked her why she wanted the middle left empty. She looked through the heart at the shelves of seed packets and the gardening gloves stacked beyond it. People look through the middle, she said, that's what it's for. The sun came round the corner of Harbour Road and lit the blue words from behind, and a single pear blossom drifted through the gap and settled on the pavement between us.