Black script lettering tattoo reading love across the side of a finger, with gold nail polish on a neighbouring finger and a red drawn heart in the background.

Script love lettering on a finger

Lettering · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A hand rests on a white surface with one finger showing the word love in black cursive script across its side. The linework is smooth and fairly bold, with even black ink and no shading. The red drawn heart and X marks in the background add a small pop of colour, and the gold nail polish on the other finger is visible at the top of the frame.

Lettering Hand Love Script Word Finger

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Wilf never let me letter anything on a shop window until I could do the joins blind. "Script's a fence, Nell," he said, tapping the board with the end of his brush. "Every bend has to sit where the eye expects it, or the whole word falls over." I was seventeen and had spent a month sweeping gold leaf off the floor, so I nodded as if I knew what a fence was.

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The red marker came from a Tuesday order. Mrs Ruddock had brought in a fish-and-chip shop name to be painted in gold, and tucked under it was a slip of paper with a heart drawn on it and two crosses, the way people do when they are too shy to say the thing itself. While Wilf was out at the lunch van, I copied the heart onto the workshop door in red felt pen, then sat on the step and tried to write the word beneath it in the loops he had shown me.

He came back and said nothing. He took my marker, drew one line under my wobbly attempt, then wrote the word again with a fine sable brush in a single unbroken stroke, the L leaning like a man in a stiff wind. "Look where it turns," he said. "The ink wants to go round the corner, not across it."

When the workshop was sold, the new owner sanded the door down to bare wood. The red heart had soaked into the grain, though, and came up pink through every coat of primer after that. By then Wilf's gold word was in the front window of the chip shop, and its bends still went round the corners where the eye wanted them.