Fine line black tattoo of the word l'amour in cursive script with a small dragonfly, on the inside of a wrist against a dark background.

L'amour script with dragonfly on a wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small black tattoo on the inner wrist shows the cursive word l'amour, with a delicate dragonfly with outlined wings joined to the final letters. The linework is thin and even, with no shading, and the ink is solid black on pale skin. The tattoo sits centrally against a dark, plain background, with the arm running diagonally into the top of the frame.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Script Dragonfly Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer the fire, the lot of you, and keep your hands off the candle. Tomas, you have heard this one nine times and still say the dragonfly flew east. It did not. Now. The abbey at Saint-Vaast had a scriptorium so cold the ink thickened in its pot by noon, and in it sat a copyist named Brother Ambroise, who had been told by the abbot that the word amour had no business on vellum. Only the psalms, the abbot said, and the price of barley, and the sayings of the fathers.

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Ambroise wrote it anyway, in the margin of a herbal, in a hand so fine it looked like thread drawn through the page. Every July the dragonflies came up off the mill pond below the cloister, and he had watched them from the wall since he was a boy, their four wings held flat as panes of sugared glass. So each time he finished a letter he drew the last stroke of the word out long and thin, and at its end he added a wing, then another, until the tail of the word had become the creature's body and the creature had become the tail of the word.

The abbot found the herbal on a wet Thursday, held it to the candle, and read the word aloud very slowly, the way a man tastes wine he suspects. Ambroise knelt on the flags and waited for the penance. None came. The abbot closed the book, carried it to his own desk, and kept it there until he died, thirty-one years later, with the margin still bare except for one small dragonfly and, beneath it, the word written again in the abbot's own shaking hand.

Now off to bed, all of you, before the prior hears us. And Tomas, it flew west.