Black script lettering quote with red, blue and yellow puzzle piece tattoos across the inside of a man's forearm.

Quote and puzzle pieces on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A forearm bears a black script quote reading 'I would not change you for the world. But I would change the world for you.' Three solid puzzle pieces in red, blue and yellow sit beside and below the text. The lettering uses clean, even outlines with light shading, and the coloured pieces are filled with flat colour against the black ink.

Lettering Forearm Quote Script text Puzzle piece

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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

Sit closer, the cold gets into a story if you leave it out on the step. The boy was sat on the kerb under the chemist's sign, waiting for a bus that was late again, and he was counting the lamps between the bridge and the shuttered bakery. Forty-one. He counted them every night, and it mattered to him that the number came out the same.

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His mother, Nell, had a plan for that. She'd spent a wet week on her knees with a tin of paint and a borrowed brush, laying squares of colour across the pavement outside their flat, so he could find his way home by them. Red, then blue, then yellow, then red again. The neighbours grumbled about the mess. A council man came round with a clipboard and a face like a wet Tuesday and told her it was a hazard. Nell said the city could keep its grey if it liked, but her boy needed edges he could hold on to.

Then one February night the storm took the power and the whole street went black except for the chippy's sign. No bus came. The boy walked home by feel, and when he reached the first red square he stopped, because someone had been at the pavement again. Fresh paint, still tacky, in a line that ran past the flat and on around the corner. And there, bent over the kerb with his clipboard in a carrier bag, was the council man, soaked through and painting a yellow square with great care.

He looked up and said, "My grandson can't abide a crooked line either. Mind the yellow, it's still wet."