Two black ink script tattoos on a forearm, one reading I'm fine and the other reading save me, shown in two stacked photographs.

'I'm fine' and 'save me' script on forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The top photograph shows the words I'm fine in a handwritten, brush-like script on the inner forearm, with a person's grey top and dark trousers visible at the left edge. The lower photograph shows the words save me in the same black lettering on the same arm, against a pale tiled floor. The lettering is solid black with no shading or colour, and the two images are stacked to show each line.

Lettering Forearm Script Word Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Harold Pardoe had lettered shop fronts on Church Street for thirty-one years, and he could knock out a fishmonger's name before the kettle boiled. The two boards Mrs Ingram carried in out of the drizzle on a Tuesday made him put down his brush. She wanted them for the chandlery window, one above the other, in the same brush hand he used for funerals and christenings.

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He asked her what they should say, though he could read the words well enough. She tapped the first board with a knuckle ringed in tarnished silver and said to paint that one first, and that the other was for the lifeboat men, in case they ever needed telling. He mixed black enamel, thinned it with turps and loaded the brush. The letters came out soft at the edges, the way his father had taught him, the tails of the f and the l curling like the end of a rope.

He did the second board with more care. Save me went on in the same black, the e a little cramped because he had run short of room. When he finished, Mrs Ingram held them up against the grey light and was quiet for a long while. Then she asked him to hang them facing the street, so the words would read the right way round for anyone walking past.

The chandlery kept them up for a month. Children stopped on the pavement to sound out the words, and a young deckhand asked Harold whether the second board was meant as a joke. He told him it was not. Every wet morning after that, Harold wiped the glass with his sleeve and looked through the lettering at the harbour, waiting to see who would come in and tell him which board they had meant.