Fresh-looking red script lettering across the back of a hand, shown as a lettering tattoo in a single line.

Red script lettering on the back of a hand

Lettering · Hand · Colour · Photo

A close photograph of the back of a hand with a line of red, cursive-style lettering running diagonally across the skin. The letters are partly hard to read and the skin around them looks raised and reddened, which suggests a fresh tattoo. The image is a single colour against natural skin tones, with a dark fabric visible at the edge of the frame.

Lettering Hand Lettering Script Text

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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 last of the Bramley crop was still hanging when Tomas Quill began copying the message onto the back of his hand, because his mother had told him a man should never carry a letter he might lose. The ink was rosehip and iron filings stirred in a saucer on the windowsill, and it stung. Each letter raised the skin a little, so he worked slowly, and the sun dropped behind the far wall while he was still on the second word.

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The letter was from Hester Vane, who lived at the top of the orchard road and had not spoken to him since the spring fair. She wanted it carried to the dairy at Lowe Farm, and she had said only that it could not wait and could not be read aloud. Tomas did not open it. He had simply found that he could not hold all of it in his head on the long road, so he decided to write the words where his eyes would fall on them every time he reached for a ladder.

By the time he reached the dairy the ink had blurred, and the words ran across his knuckles like juice from a split plum. The dairyman held the envelope to the lamp, read the first line, and then sat down on a milk churn without a word. When he finally spoke, he said Hester had written it in a hurry that morning, with her hand shaking, and that it asked only for one answer. He would not say what the answer was.

Tomas walked back up the orchard road in the dusk with the ink still burning. At the gate Hester was waiting with a lantern. She took his wrist, read what was left of the words in the yellow light, and said nothing for a long while. Then she led him inside before the frost came down, and by morning she had copied the whole line onto her own hand in the same rosehip red, so that neither of them would ever have to carry it alone.