Black and grey fine line script tattoo reading love with a small cross, on the inner wrist and forearm, set against an open printed page.

Script love and small cross on the wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey photograph of a fine line script word, love, with a small cross to its lower left, inked on the inner wrist and forearm. The linework is thin and even, with the final stroke of the L and the e looping underneath the word. The skin is shown in soft black and white against a page of printed text, which sits out of focus behind the arm.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Love Cross Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Harold Pyne had painted shop fascias in Leeds for forty years and never once been asked to write a word he did not understand. The order came in pencil on the back of a seed merchant's receipt: one word, LOVE, in a hand so fine it would barely show from the pavement, to go across the lintel of the Dissenters' chapel on Marsh Lane before the Whit fair. Beside it, a small cross, no bigger than a thumbnail.

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He worked at dawn with a quill he had cut himself, because the sable brushes were too fat for the job. The first stroke of the L kept snagging on the grain of the stone, so he tried it three times, then sat on an upturned bucket and watched the light creep across the cobbles, grey as a dishcloth. He thought of Edie, who had written him a letter every week of the war, her tails looping under the line like a cat settling into straw. She had always finished her e's that way, and he had always teased her for it.

The minister, Mr Ashby, came out with his hat in his hands and stood squinting up at the wet paint. Is it straight? he asked. Harold said it leaned a little to the left, the way things did when you wrote them quickly and meant them. Ashby said the Gaunts had paid for the window in memory of their boy, and that the lettering had to be plain enough for the old women to read from the pews. Harold nodded and did not say that plain was the easy part.

He finished the last stroke of the e, letting it swing down and under the word the way Edie's had, and set the cross just to its lower left. When he stepped back the rain had started, fine and cold, and it gathered at the bottom of the loop and hung there before dropping onto the cobbles. Somewhere past the chapel gates the first lorry for the fair ground rumbled into the square, and Harold packed his quill in its tin and went to find his breakfast.