Black and grey script lettering spelling a word across the back of a hand, with a shaded bow and diamond above it and a crown at the wrist.

Script lettering and bow on the back of a hand

Lettering · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of the back of a hand, with cursive script lettering across the knuckles and the word appears to read Motivated. Above the lettering, a shaded ribbon bow with a diamond at its centre and a crown sit on the wrist, with a faint dollar sign between them. The tattoo is done in black and grey with soft shading, against a dark backdrop, and the hand has pink and white painted nails.

Lettering Realism Hand Script Lettering Bow Diamond Crown Dollar sign Hand

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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 yourself down on that bench, the one with the dent where forty years of waiting backsides have worn it. Right. I'll tell it the way my nan told it to me on this platform, and she had it from the porter before her, who swore on his mother's grave it was true. Carrowfield Junction, nineteen fifty-something, a lost property box that nobody ever claimed. Inside was a paste brooch shaped like a crown, a satin bow with a glass diamond sewn into the knot, and a card with one word inked across it in curling copperplate. Motivated.

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The box belonged to a girl called Edie Marsh who sold ribbons from a tray on the market steps. She rode the eleven-ten to Leeds every Friday to buy off the wholesalers, and she'd been practising that word on the backs of her pay slips since she was twelve. Her mother said it was a waste of good paper. Edie said it was the only word that had ever got anyone out of Carrowfield. She wrote it in the steam on the carriage window. She wrote it on the wrapping of her sandwiches. She wrote it so often the letters grew loops like a fern.

One Friday she left the tray on the bench, ran for the train with the box under her arm, and missed it by the length of a sigh. The guard blew his whistle and the carriage slid off without her. She sat down on this same bench and cried, and the stationmaster came out with his cup of tea and asked what was the matter. She told him. He said the next train was at three and she could have a cup while she waited. By three she had a job offer from a milliner in the town who had seen the bow and wanted it in her shop window.

That box is still in the cupboard by the ticket office, if you ask nicely. The brooch is gone, but the card's still there. Mind the step on your way out.