Colour tattoo of overlapping blue block lettering with grey and white highlights across a forearm, in Lettering style.

Overlapping blue block lettering on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo spells out a single word in large, overlapping block letters that run across the forearm. Each letter is shaded in blues with white outlines, grey and pale tan highlights, and dark edging that gives a glossy, three-dimensional effect. The lettering fills the width of the frame against a plain skin background, with a kitchen counter and jars visible behind.

Lettering Forearm Lettering Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Okonedo had the ladder against the wall before the rain stopped, and he told me to hold the pot steady while he worked the last of the blue into the P. "Glaze first, then the shadow," he said, "or the letters look like they're sinking." The boatyard on the quay had been Gillard and Sons for sixty years, and the new owners wanted the name over the doors to shine like a wet gull's back. I was seventeen and thought gilt was the only thing worth doing.

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He let me do the W. Its strokes overlapped the O behind it, so every edge had to be picked out twice, once in the light and once in the dark, so the eye could tell which letter was in front. I got the white outline wrong three times. The third time he scraped it off with his thumbnail and said the trick was not to be neat but to be sure. Each letter leaned into the next like oarsmen on a long pull, and he said that was the whole secret of a word that wants to move.

The sign went up on the Saturday. Gulls landed on the cornice and considered it, and an old man stopped on the pavement to read it aloud, slowly, the way you would read a telegram. Mr Okonedo never came to see it finished. He had gone down to the slipway the night before to check the moorings, and the tide had come in faster than the forecast, the way it does on that side of the bay.

I still climb that ladder when the paint needs touching up. From the top you can see the whole word laid out along the front of the shed, and the blue catches the light off the water, and for a moment the letters seem to be pulling out past the harbour wall toward open sea.