Two side-by-side photographs of black lettering tattoos: I'm fine on the upper arm and save me on the shoulder.

I'm fine and save me script tattoos

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The left photo shows the words I'm fine in black, slanted script on the outer upper arm. The right photo shows the word save me in black script on the shoulder, with a bra strap visible at the edge of the frame. Both tattoos use solid black ink with bold, uneven lines, and the photos are plain close-ups against skin with no background detail.

Lettering Upper arm Shoulder Word Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The boats came in on the ebb that year with nothing in their holds but salt and bad weather, and Nell Brisco stood on the harbour wall counting them twice. Seven hulls. Her husband's was the eighth, and it had not come in.

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Her neighbour Pim Harrow had a habit of painting words on the bulwarks where the sea would take them off by spring. She kept a tin of black pitch and a brush worn down to a stub. Nell watched her write on the stern of the Good Intent, slanting the letters the way a gull lands, and asked what it said. Pim wiped her thumb on her apron. "I'm fine," she said. "That's for the men who come back and ask. The other is for the ones who don't."

Nell took the brush after that. She learned the letters from a bent hymn book and wrote on whatever the village offered: the hull of her husband's dinghy, the lintel of the net shed, the slipway planks. Each word went on in the same uneven black, pressed too hard so the lines bled. Some nights she wrote I'm fine on her own front door, in case he came home confused about which house was his.

In March the eighth boat limped in on one oar with a boy at the tiller who had been fourteen for a week. Its name was Hope Lantern and its hold was empty. Nell's husband was not aboard. The boy said he had gone over the side to cut a fouled line and had called out, once, that he was fine, and then the fog closed.

Nell walked down the slip that night with the pitch tin and painted SAVE ME on the seaward rock, where the tide would not reach until morning. Then she sat on the wall to wait, which was all the village had ever known how to do, and the words stayed black against the grey until the sea came up and read them.