Fine line black tattoo of the word Riddikulus in script with a feather beneath it, on the inside of a wrist.

Riddikulus script and feather on a wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a hand and inner wrist showing a tattoo of the word Riddikulus in flowing script, with a feather drawn in grey shading underneath and angled towards the thumb side. The linework is thin and mostly black, with soft grey shading in the feather. The image is taken from above against a plain skin tone, with a cluttered domestic background partly visible at the edges.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Script Feather

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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 rain came sideways over the Wednesday market at Lowmoor that afternoon, the kind that bounces off the tarpaulins and finds the gap at your collar. I had a trestle of secondhand fountain pens and a biscuit tin of loose buttons, and nobody had stopped since eleven. Then an old man in a yellow sou'wester stood dripping in front of the buttons and asked whether I sold anything that could make a fear go away.

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I told him I had a box of marbles and a clock that didn't tick. He said he wanted a word instead. His brother Alfie had taught him one in 1962, a word for making a frightening thing look daft so it lost its teeth. He couldn't remember how it was spelled, only that it sounded like a sneeze and that a sergeant had once shouted it across a playground. He wrote it on the back of a receipt in pencil, big looping letters, and I had to turn it the right way up to read it.

Then he pulled a grey feather from inside his coat, damp and bent at the tip. He said it came from a jackdaw that had sat on the bus shelter every morning of his wife's last winter, and he wanted it kept dry. I had nothing to keep it in but an empty pen case, so I lined it with a tea towel and tucked it inside.

When he left, the drizzle had thinned and the gutters were chuckling to themselves. He stopped at the gate, read his receipt aloud in a fierce, surprised voice, and laughed until he had to hold the railings. The pen case is still in my drawer. When the stall is quiet I open it, and the tea towel rustles back at me like a bird shaking itself dry.