Close photo of a wrist tattoo reading I hope you had the time of your life, with black capitals and red cursive lettering.

Quote on wrist in black and red script

Lettering · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A wrist tattoo of a sentence in two lettering styles: I HOPE YOU HAD THE in black block capitals on the upper line, and time of your life in red joined script on the line below. The linework is crisp and even, with the red script running slightly off the edge of the wrist at the right. The image is a close, evenly lit photograph against a pale, soft-focus background.

Lettering Forearm Quote Text Script

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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 purser stopped checking the passenger list around the third night out, so the leaving cards fell to me, a deckhand of nineteen with a borrowed biro and a tin of cards nobody had asked for. Each departing guest got one at the gangway. Most went straight into coat pockets and were lost to the laundry. Mrs Hale's did not. She read it at the rail as the Harwich light came up grey through the drizzle, then turned to me and asked for a pen.

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"Write something for my grandson," she said. "He'll be meeting the boat, and he'll want a reason to be cross with me for missing it." Her hand shook whenever the ship did, so I wrote slowly while she dictated. He had never once been on a ferry, she said, and would hate the smell of diesel. The card would go in his jacket, so he would find it when he least expected to.

"What should it say?" I asked. She tapped the back of my hand with a finger that smelled of violet cachous and told me to write what she had been wanting to say for forty years. So I printed the first line in capitals, then ran the rest out in a hurried joined hand, because she could no longer see well enough to ask for better. She signed it with a flourish, and I thought that was the end of it.

At the top of the gangway a lad my own age, in a hi-vis jacket, was reading the card under a lamp. He laughed out loud, the way people do when they have been caught out by something kind. Mrs Hale took his arm without looking at him. I never learned whether the words were true. I only know the ferry sounded its horn twice, and that card was the last thing she handed me before the crew took in the ropes.