Black script tattoo reading onward on the inner forearm, with silver rings and bracelets and a city view behind the hand.

Onward script tattoo on the forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A hand rests on an ornate iron railing, with a city skyline and terracotta rooftops behind it. The word onward is inked in black script along the inner forearm, with thin, even linework. The tattoo uses black ink only, and the wrist and lettering sit in the foreground against the blurred city.

Lettering Forearm Script Word Hand Wrist City Ring Bracelet

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 railing had been Aurelio's last commission before the foundry closed for August, and he left the final scroll unfinished on the bench so that Dora would have something to do with her hands. She climbed the stairs to the roof terrace every morning that week to test the bolts against the weather, watching the terracotta rooftops step down towards the harbour and the bell towers lift out of the haze behind them.

Keep reading

The word was his idea. He had cut it from a strip of flat iron the length of a forearm, the letters thin and even, because his mother had once painted the same word on the shutter of their shop and told him it was the only instruction a family needed. She had not meant a march or a battle. She had meant open the shop again tomorrow, and the day after that, whatever the bank had said.

On the last afternoon Dora found a letter folded under the vice, addressed to her in his square capitals. It said only that the train to the coast left at six, that the key to the upper gate was under the blue tile, and that she should not wait for the rain to stop before she went. Below the signature he had added a small drawing of a railing with its curls turned outwards, as if they were reaching for something past the edge of the page.

She locked the terrace gate behind her and put the key under the tile. The iron was already warm from the sun, and the city lay open beyond it, all those roofs catching the light at once. Dora went down the stairs two at a time, and did not look back at the railing, because she already knew which way it pointed.