Close-up of a hand with red-tipped nails and jewelled rings, showing a small fine-line script letter M tattoo on the back of the hand.

Script letter M tattoo on the back of a hand

Lettering · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A close-up of a woman's hand raised near her face, with only her lips and chin visible. A small, thin-lined black script letter M sits on the back of the hand, with a looped flourish. The background is soft and warm-toned, with red sequinned fabric and red-tipped nails and a red jewelled heart ring drawing the eye.

Lettering Fine line Hand Monogram Script Ring Heart Nail

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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 heart came to me in a biscuit tin that still smelled of custard powder. Inside were two hundred and twelve red stones, each one chipped from an old necklace, and a note in careful capitals that said only: MAKE IT LOUD ENOUGH TO HEAR ACROSS A DANCE FLOOR. I have set a lot of rings above a bakery in Clerkenwell, but I had never been asked to make something that wanted to be overheard.

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The woman who brought the tin was called Dolores Hartigan, and she sat on my stool for an hour, turning a teaspoon over and over while I worked out the claws. Her husband had been a cabaret drummer, she said, and he had left her three things: the tin, a debt, and a habit of writing his initial on every envelope he sent. She wanted that initial inside the band, small enough that nobody would notice unless they wanted to. My apprentice, Tomasz, asked whether she meant the M for Mick or the M for Marguerite, and she laughed so hard she had to put the teaspoon down.

I engraved the M by hand under a lamp that buzzed like a trapped wasp, working a loop into its right stroke so the letter seemed to be leaning towards the stones. When I finished, Dolores slid the ring on. It was a size too big, so I wound a sliver of red thread beneath the shank to hold it, and she held her hand up to the window. The garnets threw small red coins across the ceiling, and for a moment the whole workshop looked like the inside of a dress that had been dancing all night.