Black script lettering reading 'I am not a gun' on an inner forearm, with a red splash and a thin underline swoosh, photographed inside a car.

Script phrase 'I am not a gun' on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo is a flowing script phrase, 'I am not a gun', in black ink with a larger decorative capital I and a slightly speckled, distressed edge on the letters. A soft red splash sits behind the end of the phrase, with a fine red and black wavy line running beneath it. The photo is taken in a car interior with the forearm and hand in frame, and the tattoo fills the centre of the shot.

Lettering Forearm Text Script Quote Watercolour splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had found its way into the shed again, so I was carrying the ash blanks out into the yard when the seventh plank slid off the rack and I saw the pencil on its underside. Dad's square capitals, faded to grey, but the words were plain enough. I am not a gun. Beneath them he had pressed hard enough to dent the grain, and a brown mark where his thumb had bled onto the wood.

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The plank had come out of the big pine that came down on the Hollin ridge the winter the men from the town started asking after stock wood. They wanted straight-grained lengths for a rifle maker's workshop, and they offered more money than the village had seen since the mill shut. Dad told them the forest at the edge of Hollin was for keeping birds and children from getting lost, not for making things that went bang. He said it once in the Crown, loud enough that the landlord laughed and then stopped laughing. After that the vans stopped coming up Crossways Lane.

I should have burned the plank, or kept it for the stove. Instead I sanded the whole length back to pale wood, rounded the ends and made a rocking horse for Mrs Pell's grandson, who turns three at Easter and is afraid of loud doors. I left the pencil where it was, under the varnish, because that was what Dad wanted, I think, for someone to find it when the horse was old and the words had gone soft in the wood.

When I carried the horse down the lane on Saturday, the boy ran his hand along the runners and asked me what it was called. I told him it had no name yet. He thought about that, then pointed at the grain beneath the saddle and said, very seriously, that it looked like it had been somewhere.