Black fine-line script reading I am with a small crown beside it, tattooed on the inner wrist of a light-skinned forearm.

Script I am and small crown on a wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a small black tattoo on the inner wrist, showing the words I am in flowing cursive script with a tiny crown to the right. The linework is thin and even, in solid black ink with no shading, and the lettering is the clear focus of the frame. The background is softly out of focus, with a pale blouse and a floral cup visible behind the hand.

Lettering Fine line Forearm Script Lettering Crown Wrist

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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 trains are running late tonight and the kettle's on. You'll want to hear about Walter Brind, who painted the name boards at Hollin Cross for forty years, and the winter the lamp oil ran out.

Keep reading

Walter had a steady hand and a bad habit of signing his work. Every board he lettered had two small words tucked under the station name, in a curl of black paint so fine you had to lean in to read it. The porters called it vanity. The stationmaster called it cheek. Only old Mrs Thorne, who sold pies from the bench by the north gate, knew the words were meant for her, because Walter had courted her with ink for three years and never once said them aloud.

Then came the night the signal box caught and the sign over platform two went dark with it. Walter climbed the ladder in the sleet with a tin of paint and a brush no thicker than a hair, and by morning the board read HOLLIN CROSS in letters you could see from the far end of the cutting. Beneath it, a small crown, and the two words, the way he always wrote them.

Mrs Thorne came out with her apron still on and stood in the slush looking up. She never said a word about it. She did, however, sell him the last pie of the day for a penny, which the porters swore was the most romantic thing they had ever witnessed at Hollin Cross.

When they buried her, Walter had a mason cut the same two words into her headstone, small, with a crown above them. The board is still up on platform two if you care to look. Mind the step.