Colour tattoo of four stacked alphabet blocks spelling ISLA in Lettering style on the outer forearm of a person wearing a white t-shirt.

ISLA letter blocks on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Colour · Photo

Four stacked wooden-style alphabet blocks spell the word ISLA down the forearm, each block with a raised letter and shaded edges that give it depth. The shading is smooth and blended, with warm yellow and orange tones on the I and L blocks and pink and purple tones on the S and A blocks. The tattoo is centred on the forearm against a plain white t-shirt and dark trousers, with the crop showing only the arm and torso.

Lettering Forearm Letter Word

Find an artist for this

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

Harold Penhale had the last block drying on the bench when the wind changed, and he knew before the radio did what it meant for the Morwenna. He had cut the four blocks from a length of ash left over from the Thursday boat's new strakes, sanded them until they took the lamp light like butter, and painted the faces by hand the way his mother had done his own letters in Newlyn.

Keep reading

The order had come from his daughter-in-law in the spring. Isla was to learn her letters from something that would last, she said, not from a plastic thing that split in the bath. Harold had made the blocks plain at first, then pictured the child dropping them on flagstones, and shaded every edge so the wood would look as though it had been handled for years. The I and the L he painted in buttercup and ochre. The S and the A he gave rose and a deep mackerel purple, mixed from the last tin of hull paint Tom had left on the shelf.

The Morwenna was found on the Wednesday, upturned off the Gull Rock, and Tom was not aboard her. Harold went back to the bench on Thursday and did nothing for an hour except look at the A, which was still tacky at one corner. Then he took the finest brush and went over the raised letter a second time, because it seemed wrong to leave it lighter than the others.

Isla came up the lane on the Saturday in her mother's coat, carrying a biscuit tin, and she tipped the blocks out across the kitchen table. She stacked I, S, L, A with her tongue between her teeth, and when the whole word stood there she looked up at him, waiting to be told it was right. He said it was. It was the first thing he had said aloud all week that was not about the weather.