Black and grey script lettering with shaded edges across a man's forearm, placed on the forearm, with a skull tattoo partly visible at the bottom right.

Script name lettering on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A man's forearm, seen from behind with his face turned away, carries large black and grey script lettering with shaded outlines and swirling flourishes. The letters are filled with solid black and soft grey shading, giving them depth against the skin. A partial black and grey skull design appears at the bottom right of the frame.

Lettering Forearm Script Lettering Skull

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Halloran & Sons Travelling Circus had nine wagons left that spring, and I was the only man still carrying sign-writer's brushes in his coat. Mostly I painted the lions' names and the price boards for the candyfloss, but in April Mrs Ada Pym asked for something different. Her daughter, Bella Jade, was going to fly the high rigging for the last time before the big top went to a scrapyard in Wigan, and she wanted the name across the ring wagon in letters that would outlast the canvas.

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I worked on the stepladder for three nights under a single bulb. I did the capitals first, the B swinging back like a trapeze bar, then the tail of the J and the long loop of the d running over the side panel. Shading was the hard part. I mixed black with a drop of lamp oil and worked it into the inside of each stroke so the letters looked lifted off the wood and set down a fraction too close to the light. Bella came out on the third night in her practice coat and stood at the foot of the ladder without saying anything.

She asked if I could make the name look like it was moving. I told her paint doesn't move, and she said that was the whole trick of a trapeze, that nothing moves until you let go. So I added the flourishes, thin grey ribbons curling off the final e, and she watched each one go on.

The tent came down in June. I still have the ladder. Last I heard, the wagon sits in a field outside Bolton with her name still on it, and the rain has taken the grey off the ribbons but not the black.