Black and grey script lettering tattooed across a woman's lower abdomen above black underwear, with a colour traditional-style tattoo on the upper arm at the top left.

Script lettering across the lower abdomen

Lettering · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A close photograph of a woman's midriff and lower abdomen, with a black and grey cursive script tattoo sitting just below the navel and curving across the hip. A larger colour tattoo on the upper arm at the top left shows red, green and yellow shading with dark feather-like forms. Warm sunlight and hard shadows fall across the skin, and the crop cuts off the face.

Lettering Traditional Upper arm Other Script Lettering 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 brush had gone stiff in the heat, so Maren Votto spat on the bristles and tried again. The sign said VACANCY in the old copperplate her father had taught her, but the owner of the Saltwash Motel wanted the letters to lean, the way a feather leans into wind, and he had paid cash for exactly that. Past the fence the road ran straight to the horizon, shimmering like something poured.

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Her father used to say a good hand never hurried its loops. He had lettered petrol station signs from Barstow to Needles with a number seven quill and enamel he mixed in the back of the truck. When he died, he left her the quills, a ledger of customers who still owed him, and a red-tailed hawk feather tucked in a matchbox, pulled from the grille of a car one July.

The owner came out at noon with two lemonades sweating in his hands. He squinted at the sign, then at her, then tapped the word that had come out wrong. 'Too tidy,' he said. 'Make it look like it's already leaving.' Maren laughed, then didn't. She dipped the quill, let the ink thin out at the tail of the last letter, and watched the stroke drift toward the road as if a breeze had caught it.

By dusk the sign hummed in the cooling air. Nobody came in that night, but at first light a car idled out front, a passenger wound down the window, and she saw the word had done its work. She slipped the matchbox into her shirt pocket and climbed back up the ladder, where the next letter was already waiting.