Black and grey lettering tattoo of poem lines in a typewriter-style font running across the inner forearm.

Poem lines tattooed across the forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Four lines of typewriter-style text in black ink run across the inner forearm, set in a left-aligned block with slightly uneven baselines. The lettering is crisp and solid with fine serifs, and the skin is shown in black and white against a dark, textured background. The text fills most of the frame, with the wrist visible at the right edge.

Lettering Forearm Quote Text Typewriter font

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 gilt had come away from the left-hand corner of the frame, leaving a bald patch the colour of weak tea, and Mr Adeyemi wanted it mended before the viewing at nine. So I worked through the night in the back room of the Cathedral Street gallery, the radio turned low, the city's orange light bleeding grey across the skylight.

Keep reading

Around two the side buzzer went. A man stood on the step in a wet overcoat, asking whether the harbour painting was still hanging. He said his father had sat in front of it every Sunday for thirty years and never once said a word about it. I should have sent him home. Instead I let him in and walked him through the empty rooms, our footsteps going off the marble like a clock nobody had wound.

He stopped in front of the canvas and said nothing for so long I thought he'd dozed on his feet. The sea in it is only paint, grey strokes with a yellow smudge where the sun should be, but he looked at it as if it might still be moving. Then he said his father used to claim that a picture was just a world agreed to stay put inside a frame, and that if the real one could be kept still like that, people would finally see how much there was to stand and stare at.

I went back to my glue pot. When I looked up he had his hands in his coat pockets and his mouth a little open, and I didn't have the heart to tell him the varnish needed till morning.