Black script lettering spelling Joy with a shaded pink flower on the inner wrist, in a botanical lettering style.

Joy script with flower on wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo spells the word Joy in flowing script with a bold black outline and grey shading on the letters. A single five-petalled flower with soft mauve-pink shading sits beside the lettering and curls around the final letter. The design fills the frame on a light skin tone, with the lettering and flower centred.

Lettering Botanical Forearm Script Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hush now and pass that lamp along, because the sea won't wait for a man to finish his tea. You want to know why Tobias Greave went about with a word inked on his wrist, the year the Marisol lay three weeks becalmed off the Horn? Then listen, and keep your hands off the rum.

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Greave was the ship's carpenter, and a surly one. Every morning he planed the same length of teak rail until the oil came up gold, and every morning the cook, a Maltese woman called Rosa Vella, left a single mauve bloom from the galley window box on the rail beside his tools. Nobody knew where she got flowers in that wind. She never said, and he never asked, though he pressed each one flat inside his logbook.

On the nineteenth day the water went flat as a plate and a boy fell from the mizzen. They hauled him up breathing, mostly. Greave sat by the hatch that night with his knife and his pencil and drew a word on the back of his hand, then on his wrist, the letters looping like a gull's wing over the water. Rosa asked what it meant. He said it was the one word the calm had never managed to take off him.

The wind came back on the twenty-second day. Greave kept the flowers in the logbook until the Marisol was broken up in Bristol, and when the yard men cut his coat off they found the book still tied to his belt. The last page held one bloom, its petals gone the colour of old wine, and beside it, in his square carpenter's hand, he had written only the word.