Black script tattoo reading "I was perfect." across the top of a foot, with the toes visible against a dark glossy surface.

"I was perfect" script on a foot

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a bare foot showing a black script tattoo reading "I was perfect." across the top, running from the ankle side towards the toes. The lettering is smooth and cursive with even, dark black ink and some varied line weight. The foot fills most of the frame against a dark, shiny surface partly covered with clear plastic.

Lettering Other Script Text Quote Foot

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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

Dear Ruth, you asked why I stopped lettering shop fronts after forty years, and the honest answer is a man called Denny Oakes who came into the workshop on a wet Tuesday with a cardboard tube under his arm. He wanted a board for the window of his late mother's café on the market, nothing fancy, only a line in the old copperplate. He unrolled the design and I saw he'd written it himself, shaky at the capitals, and under it the words I was perfect, as if she had said them, or he had.

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I told him the spacing would have to be looser to carry the weight, and he said she'd have hated a cramped line. So we argued about the swash on the I for the best part of an hour, the kettle going cold on the shelf, rain dripping off the awning onto the cabbages outside.

Then he asked whether I could make the letters run the way a signature does, leaning forward, quick at the start and slow at the tail. I did it in a single pass with a number three sable, dipping at each join, and when I finished the paint was dry before he'd finished his tea. He looked at it for a long time and said, "That's her hand," though none of us had ever seen it.

He never hung the board. He left it propped against my radiator, and I still have it, and whenever the rain comes sideways off the harbour I think of him holding it up to the light, checking the line was straight the way you'd check a child's collar before she goes in to be looked at.