Close photograph of the words nothing is permanent in fine black script lettering across the inner forearm near the wrist.

Nothing is permanent script on a wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The image shows the phrase nothing is permanent written in a flowing, connected script in black ink across the skin of an inner forearm near the wrist. The linework is thin and even, with looping ascenders and descenders and a small flourish at the end of the final word. The skin is a neutral tone against a dark purple-brown surface, and the text fills the centre of the frame.

Lettering Fine line Forearm Script Text Quote

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 last poster I lettered for Halloran's Travelling Circus was for a field outside Thirsk where there would be no tent. Mr Halloran wanted the old copperplate, the looping capitals he'd seen on a playbill in Leeds before the war, and I gave it to him with a number two sable and a jar of Indian ink gone thick in the cold. 'Make the tails long,' he said, squinting at my pencil guides. 'People like a line that carries on past where it ought to stop.'

Keep reading

I made the tails long. I made the ascenders tall enough to catch the wind off the moor. By the third week the ringmaster's bowler had gone to the pawnbroker, and Dolly the elephant had been sold to a farm near Ripon that needed a hard worker more than a crowd did. The children who used to chase our wagons stood at the gate with their hands in their pockets, watching us unpeg the canvas one rope at a time.

On the last night Mr Halloran climbed the caravan steps with a flask and read the phrase back to me slowly, the way a man reads a will. 'Nothing is permanent,' he said. 'Clever, that. Whoever wrote it must have been skint.' He laughed, then didn't. I told him the paint would outlast the show by years, and he said that was the trouble with signs. They always outlived the thing they were selling.

In the morning the wagon went north with its new owner, the lettering facing the road. I stayed behind to pack my brushes. The ink wouldn't come out of the sable, and I found I didn't mind. Somewhere past Northallerton a stranger would read that long tail and never know it was drawn for a circus that was already gone.