Black and grey realistic tattoo of an ink pot, quill and crumpled paper with the words Stay strong, on a forearm.

Quill, ink pot and script on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a glass ink pot beside a feather quill resting on crumpled paper, with the script words Stay strong written across the paper. The ink pot, paper folds and quill barbs are shaded with smooth gradients and highlights to give a three-dimensional effect. The image is in black and grey, with the design filling the forearm and the skin tone visible around it.

Realism Lettering Forearm Quill Feather Paper Script Stay strong

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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 ink has thickened in the night, so you warm the pot between your palms before you dip the quill. On the ninth tier of Harrow Deep the lifts have been dead since the storms, and the only words that still reach the lower galleries travel by hand. Your work is to copy them onto pulped linen paper, because the relay engines will not accept anything they cannot read twice, and nobody trusts a voice that has been squeezed through a wire.

Keep reading

Today's sheet is no ministry order. It is a crumpled scrap sent up by Ysolde from the water works, who has written only two words and then pressed so hard the nib tore the grain. Stay strong. She wants them slanted and looped the way her grandmother wrote on the backs of ration cards. You trace the S twice, once for the nib and once for the ghost the nib leaves in the fibre, because the old hands always left a shadow and the engines read shadows too.

Somewhere behind the wall, cold water drips in a steady count. You sand the drying ink with your sleeve and wonder what strength is for, down there, where the pumps hum all day and nobody sings. The copy must match the scrap exactly, every fold and every blot, or the sluice watch will refuse it and the gate will stay shut against the rising river.

You seal the page in oilcloth and drop it down the brass tube. Three knocks climb back up the pipe a minute later, the signal that the gate has opened and the water is turning back. You rub the ink from your fingertips and set the pot aside, already warm again in your hands, ready for whatever comes up next.