Black stylised lettering reading LOVE on the inner forearm, with a looping swash finishing the final letter, shown beside a wine glass.

LOVE lettering on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A bold black tattoo spelling the word LOVE runs across the forearm, with the O formed into a looping, heart-like shape and a thin flourish trailing from the E. The lettering is solid black ink with smooth, even edges and no shading. The arm is photographed against a glass of red wine, a zebra-print vase and a cowhide rug, with the word placed diagonally across the frame.

Lettering Forearm Love Word Infinity

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, boy, where the lamp can reach your hands. No, not that chisel. The little one with the notch. You will need a steady wrist for what I am going to tell you, because it concerns a letter that would not stay straight, and the man who let it wander.

Keep reading

Forty winters back, in the stone yard below Eboracum, a mason named Corvinus was paid to cut a single word over the gate of a widow's bathhouse. She had asked for the word the grain merchants shouted at weddings, and she paid in good oil and two silver spoons, so Corvinus took his time. He chalked the letters on a slab of grey limestone: L, O, V, E. The first three sat square as bread. The O he drew round and round, and each time he tried to close it, the line ran past its own beginning and curled back like a wave that cannot quite reach the shore.

His master threatened to have his hide. The widow came down with a jug of wine to see the delay for herself. Corvinus did not argue. He took up the chalk, let the O loop into a heart, and ran the tail of the E out into a thin flourish that bent back on itself and refused to end. Hung over the gate, the stone looked like a mistake. The widow stood beneath it a long while, then laughed and said she had never finished anything either.

The rain has worn the edges soft, but the loop still holds the wet like a cupped hand. Every evening the bathhouse girls run their fingers round it on the way in, and not one of them has ever found where it starts.