Fine line script tattoo reading 'Ohana in dark ink on the upper shoulder near the collarbone, with blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail.

'Ohana script tattoo on the shoulder

Fine line · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A small black script word, 'Ohana, sits on the skin at the top of the shoulder near the collarbone. The linework is thin and even, with the lettering set at a slight upward slant across the frame. The photo shows only the neck, shoulder and hair, with a yellow strap and a plain indoor background, and the ink appears dark grey to black.

Fine line Lettering Shoulder Ohana Script Word

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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

The seating plan had one chair too many by Thursday, and Aunt Mere said it was bad luck to leave it empty. I'd spent three nights with the table diagram spread across my kitchen floor, moving the same names around a grid of round tables like a stubborn game of draughts. Every time I got the sums to work, someone's grudge got in the way. Dad's cousin from Auckland had written back with a single line, coming, with the boys, which made the count fourteen and the maths impossible.

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The name I kept leaving off was Ruth Pickering. She and my grandfather had fallen out over a strip of land in 1987, and nobody had sat in the same room with her since. Tom, who was getting married on the Saturday, wanted me to leave her be. He said weddings were for the people who showed up, not for settling old arguments. I said Grandad used to say a family word, 'ohana, that he'd picked up from a deckhand on a ship out of Honolulu when he was nineteen. It meant the people you don't leave standing on the dock. Tom went quiet at that, then shrugged and told me to do what I liked.

I wrote her name on a card in the same slanted capitals I used for everything, and put it at a table by the side door where the draught came in. She arrived late, shaking rain off a green umbrella, and stood in the doorway longer than was comfortable before she saw the card. When Tom stood up to speak, he didn't mention her at all. He just lifted his glass and said that the best thing his grandad ever taught him was that nobody gets left out of the photograph. Ruth laughed, very suddenly, into her napkin.

Afterwards I found the spare card in my jacket pocket, the one with fourteen names on it. I had forgotten to throw it away, and it still had the wrong number written across the top.