Hand-drawn flash design of the script phrase la Vita è Bella above a simple arrow, drawn in dark ink on paper.

Script phrase with arrow design

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A hand-drawn design of the phrase "la Vita è Bella" in flowing cursive script, with a straight arrow drawn beneath it. The lettering and arrow are in thin dark ink with fine, slightly uneven strokes, and the arrow has an open head on the left and feathered fletching on the right. The design sits centred on cream paper with a dark sepia vignette around the edges.

Lettering Script Phrase Arrow Lettering

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The card came in a biscuit tin with a bent hinge, along with two odd gloves, a wind-up robin and a timetable from 1974. Someone had written on the back of a pools coupon in thin brown ink: la Vita è Bella, and beneath it a straight line with feathers at one end and a hooked point at the other, as if it had been shot from the wrong side of the page. I have worked lost property at Haverdale for nineteen years, and nothing has ever come in with a direction on it.

Keep reading

Ruth from the buffet said the arrow was Cupid's, which it was not. On Thursday the 16:40 to Carlisle was cancelled, and a man in a grey raincoat sat on the bench by platform four holding a postcard of a hillside town, its corners soft from handling. I asked whether he had lost something. He said his sister had written that phrase to him from a hospital bed in Pisa, and he had never decided whether she meant it as a joke.

I did not tell him the tin had come from a bin on Platform Two. I sat beside him while the rain slanted across the glass roof and the departure board clattered through its letters. We both looked where the arrow on his postcard pointed, at the rails running off toward the tunnel, and neither of us spoke for a long while.

When the 17:10 pulled in, he stood, tucked the postcard into his coat and walked to the third carriage without looking back. I put the tin on the shelf under R and wrote the date on the label. Some things are only ever claimed once, and when I left that evening the arrow on the coupon was still pointing at the tunnel.