Close view of a fine line black script lettering tattoo running along a woman's raised forearm, with a white dress printed with cartoon figures behind it.

Script lettering tattoo on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman's raised forearm shows a line of thin black script lettering that runs diagonally from near the wrist towards the elbow. The linework is fine and even, with no shading, and the ink is solid black on fair skin. The tight crop frames the arm against a white dress printed with cartoon figures and a blurred background.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Script Lettering Text Forearm Bracelet Necklace

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell,

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The van gave up outside Rye, so I walked the last six miles with the sign brushes in a biscuit tin and your postcard folded in my shirt pocket. I read it twice at the bus shelter, once for the news about Dad's allotment and once for the bit underneath, where you wrote that I should stop treating every commission like a funeral. You are right, which is annoying in a letter.

The job is a shopfront for a teashop on the high street, gold leaf on black, the name in a chained script that Mrs Okafor insisted must look hand-cut rather than printed. I have been practising it on old newspaper all week. The trick, as Grandad taught us, is to let the brush decide the thickness and never argue with it. Pressure goes down on the downstroke, lifts on the turn, and the whole line comes out thin and even, like wire pulled slowly through butter.

On Thursday a lad from the sixth college stopped to watch and asked if I'd ever painted anything he could wear. I said the only thing I'd ever signed my name to was a fishmonger's window in Battle. He laughed, then asked what the writing on my arm meant. I had not expected that. I told him it was a line I'd put there myself at twenty, when I was too proud to take anyone's advice, and that I've never been sure it was the right advice to ignore.

I'll be home for Sunday dinner if the leaf dries in time. Tell Dad the shopfront is holding. Tell him the line runs from the corner to the door without a single wobble, the way he taught me, and that my hand was shaking a little at the end, which he will never believe.

Love, Tom