Two photographs of black script lettering reading I'm fine on a forearm, with the lower panel showing the same words rotated 180 degrees.

'I'm fine' script lettering on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The image has two stacked close-up photographs of the same tattoo on a forearm. The top panel shows the words I'm fine in a loose, handwritten black script, and the lower panel shows the same lettering rotated upside down. The ink is solid black with clean, slightly uneven outlines against lightly tanned skin, and the blurred background is a dark, cool tone.

Lettering Forearm Text Handwriting Script Word

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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

You hold the postcard up to the kitchen window the way your mother taught you, because the ink always bleeds through from the back and she wrote everything twice. Saltcombe harbour is grey beyond the glass, the gulls working over the fish market, and the card says what it has said every Thursday since the Marigold went out past the breakwater: I'm fine. Your brother never could write a word without a second look at it.

Keep reading

Turn it over and you see the rest. Pete taught you the trick when you were nine and he was twelve, the two of you hunched on the harbour wall with a stub of pencil: write a thing the right way, then write it again so the other person has to rotate the page to read it. Upside down, the letters stop being a sentence and become a set of hooks, and the second line, when you tilt your head, says something else entirely. Nobody else in Saltcombe would bother.

So on Thursday you do what the card asks. You walk down to the slipway, where Jim Harker is mending nets with a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, and you ask him for the Marigold's position. He does not ask why. He just looks at the sea and says, "She's been sitting off the Skerries since Tuesday, love, with a bad engine and a good cook."

You are on the first ferry out before you have decided to go. The card is still in your pocket, and on the deck you turn it over once more, read it the other way, and let the wind take the corner out of your hand.