Black ink script lettering with a looping swirl on the inner wrist, shown beside a hand with ombre nails in a car interior.

Script lettering on a wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a hand raised in front of a car dashboard and steering wheel, with the wrist in the lower frame. The black ink tattoo on the wrist is script lettering with a looping swirl and a wing-like shape beneath it, drawn in solid, clean lines. The image is in colour, but the tattoo is black ink only, and the background is a warm, slightly washed-out interior.

Lettering Forearm Script Swirl Wing Wrist Hand 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

Sit yourself down on the coal box, boy, and mind the tiller, it has a mind of its own past Braunston. My grandfather Joe never wrote a proper letter in his life. He couldn't spell hedge without a dictionary, but the summer he met my grandmother on the Oxford Canal he went to a stonemason in Rugby and paid him a week's wages to cut two words into a lock gate. My life, it said. Just that. He reckoned a man ought to put his whole life on the one thing he couldn't carry off the boat.

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The lock gate rotted out in the sixties, but the wing was his idea, not the mason's. He drew it on the back of a tide table, feathers swept back like a bird coming in low over the water to land. Your great-aunt Vi laughed at him for it. Said a barge hasn't got wings, and neither has a man with a lame leg and a bad temper.

Then came the winter the ice held us three weeks at Hatton. He sat in the cabin with a lamp and that tide table, and the loops of the letters went round and round on the paper like the eddy below a weir. He didn't draw a bird that night. He drew a way out. Pass me the kettle. There. Now listen, because this is the bit they never tell in the pub.

He went back to Rugby in the spring with the drawing in his pocket and nothing to pay with but the boat, and the mason took it, grumbling. Vi didn't speak to him for a year. Every time I come through a lock since, I lay my palm flat on the gate where the letters used to be and feel for them in the grain.