Black and white photo of a fine line script tattoo reading imagine across the inner forearm, with the hand extended to the right.

Imagine script on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A thin black script word reading imagine runs diagonally across the inner forearm, with a long, sweeping tail on the left and a loop on the descender of the g. The linework is even and clean, with no visible shading, and the photograph is monochrome. The forearm fills the centre of the frame against a wooden floor, with the hand and painted nails partly visible at the top right.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Word Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The widow came down to the slip on a Tuesday with a tin of white gloss and a request nobody in Porthally had ever made of me. She wanted no name on her husband's crabber, only a word, and she wanted it in script, the sort the chapel uses on its Christmas board.

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"Imagine," she said, and set the tin on my bench. "Thirty-one years he told me that was a daft word to paint on a boat. Do it anyway."

I mixed the black on a palette knife and pulled the first stroke out from the left, long and thin, a wake that trailed off before the letters had properly started. The i and the m came easily. The g wanted a loop hung below the line, the way a line dangles off the quay when someone is waiting on a fish, and I had to go round it twice before my hand agreed with my eye. Two lads from the net loft leaned on the rail to watch. Nobody talked.

When it was dry she walked the length of the hull, reading it from bow to stern, and then asked me to write the same word on the slip wall where the spring tides would take it off by March. I said I could not. She said that was rather the point. She pressed a coin into my palm, one with the old king on it, and climbed aboard. When the boat cleared the harbour wall I could still read the word from the quay, first forwards and then backwards, as she brought the bow round into the light.