Black and grey lettering tattoo on a forearm spelling LOVE, with the letters formed by a hairdryer, hand mirror, scissors and a curling iron cord.

LOVE lettering made from salon tools on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo spells the word LOVE, with each letter drawn as a salon tool: a hairdryer for the L, a hand mirror for the O, a pair of scissors for the V and a looping cord for the E. The linework is fine and the objects are shaded in soft grey gradients with darker outlines. The design sits across the inner forearm and is shown in a close, straight-on crop against a plain green top.

Lettering Forearm Love Scissors Cord Lettering

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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

Come in off the platform, the lot of you. The 6.40 is running late again and there's no harm in a story while we wait. You want to know how four salon tools end up spelling a word? Ask Marjorie Penhaligon, who kept one chair under the arches at Harrowgate Junction for thirty years. Her dryer had a cracked handle, her hand mirror had a silver rim worn thin by thumbs, her scissors were her father's, and her curling cord looped round like a question nobody liked to answer.

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In the February of 1987 a signalman called Dev Rathore started coming in on Thursdays. He never wanted a cut. He sat in the chair with his cap on his knee and talked about the points freezing and the rain running down the signal box glass, and Marjorie swept up whatever fell and said very little. She told the girls afterwards that a man who asks for nothing has usually come for something. For eleven Thursdays he came. On the twelfth he didn't, and the chair stayed empty until the sweeping stopped being done.

Spring came and went. Then one Thursday in May the bell over the door rang, and there was Dev, his hair grown long over his ears, holding a newspaper with a post in Leeds circled in red ink. He said he'd been a coward. Marjorie didn't look up from the mirror. She took down her father's scissors, sat him in the chair, and started cutting. Hold still, she said. Somebody has to see the back of your head.