Two forearms with matching black fine line script tattoos of the word beloved, placed on the inner forearms.

Matching beloved script on two forearms

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two forearms show matching tattoos of the word beloved written in flowing cursive script, with the lettering running diagonally up each arm. The linework is thin and solid black, with no shading or colour, and the words sit against pale skin on a dark, blurred background.

Lettering Fine line Forearm Script Word Matching

Find an artist for this

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

The rain had been coming off the market canopies since six, and by half eleven Dilys had abandoned her apple stall and was sitting on my upturned crate under the awning of the lettering van. She had a tin of photographs on her knees and an old sign board wrapped in a tea towel. "I want it done properly," she said, "the way he did it, not the way these shops print things now."

Keep reading

The board had been her husband's work, painted in 1978 when the stall first opened, a single word in gold leaf on dark green. He had let the tails of the letters run so far that they crossed one another like the strings of a kite. The word was beloved, and it had faded to the colour of weak tea. She wanted two copies, one for her and one for her daughter, who was flying to Lisbon on Monday and would not be home for a year. I asked her why two. She pushed a photograph across the crate at me instead, and in it a girl of about nine stood between two grown-up hands, both of them turned the same way.

I worked through the afternoon with a size two brush and a jar of sign enamel, thinning it with a drop of turps as I went. The rain drummed on the van roof and the stalls emptied one by one. When I came to the long tail of the first b I had to stop, because the stroke wanted to keep going, so I let it. For the second board I flipped the stencil, so the tails curved back towards the first, and the two words would lean into each other when they hung either side of the stall door.

Dilys held the boards up at the entrance, one in each hand, and for a moment the words met in the middle, reading beloved from both ends at once. She paid me in coins from the tin and said her daughter would never believe a word of it. Outside the rain had stopped, and the gutters ran gold where the lamps caught them.