Three fingers of a hand with the words Live, Laugh and Love in black script lettering, one word per finger, with red painted nails.

Live, Laugh, Love script across three fingers

Lettering · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a hand resting on a surface, with the words Live, Laugh and Love written in flowing script across the top joints of the index, middle and ring fingers. The lettering is dark ink with smooth, even linework and soft shading along the strokes, and the ink appears blue-black against the skin. The warm, lightly lit background and red nails sit around the tattoos, with the words kept central and in clear focus.

Lettering Hand Love Word Phrase

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm had spent eleven years on the capitals of the Psalter, and he could letter a fox in the margin without lifting his pen, but the abbot wanted three words on the lid of the new reliquary box and she wanted them to flow. "Flow," Abbot Hildred had said, tapping the vellum with a bony finger. "Like a river. Like the Wear in spring."

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Anselm dipped his quill in the blue-black iron gall and tried the first word. The L came out stiff as a gatepost. He scraped it off with a pumice stone, the grit loud in the cold scriptorium, and tried again. Outside, the bell for None rang over the wet fields, and Brother Osric shuffled past the door with a barrow of turnips, singing something rude under his breath.

By the third day the ink had stopped behaving. Anselm found that if he let his wrist go soft, the loops curled on their own, the V swinging wide as a swallow's tail, the o closing like a held breath. Hildred came in at Compline, leaned over his shoulder, and was quiet for so long that he began to fear the worst.

"That's the one," she said at last, and went out without another word, which from Hildred was praise.

Anselm sat a while with the pen drying. Then, on a scrap of spare vellum, he wrote the three words again, smaller and looser, the way Osric laughed at his own jokes, and tucked it inside his sleeve where the cold would not reach it.