Black ornate script lettering with looping flourishes on the inner forearm, close to the wrist.

Ornate script lettering on an inner forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman's inner forearm shows an ornate script lettering tattoo in solid black ink, with looping, swirled strokes and flourished capitals running towards the wrist. Only the lower face and lips are visible, and a thin ring sits on the hand. The warm, sepia-toned photo is taken at close range, with the tattoo centred across the lower half of the frame.

Lettering Forearm Script Lettering Flourish Wrist

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

Mr Ellery had painted names on hulls and shopfronts in Grimsby for thirty years, and he could tell a man's character from the first swash of his surname. The widow Fenwick came in on a wet Tuesday with a folded paper and a request that the letters on her husband's cart be gilded, not plain. She had written the name out in pencil, all loops and tails, and he saw at once it was harder than it looked.

Keep reading

He worked through the Thursday and the Friday, lamp lit by four, sable brush loaded with japan gold. The capital needed three attempts. Each time the tail of the first letter curled too far and crowded the second, so the name read like something tangled in a net. On the Saturday he laid the cart flat on trestles and said, "It wants room, missus, or it wants a shorter word."

She laughed, which surprised him. "He always said it was a long name for a short man." She told him the flourish had been her husband's own habit, a dash he put after every tally and receipt, and she wanted it as he wrote it, not as a printer would set it. Ellery stopped trying to make it neat. He let the strokes run and let the tail go where the hand wanted, and the name came out in one breath across the wood.

When the gold dried, she ran a thumb along the last loop and said nothing for a while. Then she paid him in coins, two shillings more than agreed, and took the cart out into the rain with the lettering catching the lamplight like a line of fish hooks. Ellery cleaned his brushes and noticed his own hand had cramped into the same looping shape, and he left it that way.