Black fine line script tattoo reading Bind my wandering heart to Thee running along the inner forearm.

Script quote along a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of a forearm with a single line of cursive script reading Bind my wandering heart to Thee. The letters use fine, even linework with a flowing, slightly slanted hand and some looped capitals. The phrase runs the length of the forearm against plain skin, with a dark background and a sleeve edge visible at the top right.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Script Quote Handwriting Lettering

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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 snow had buried the coach road by the third day, and the landlord of the Hollin Cross had stopped pretending he expected anyone else. You sit by the fire with your boots steaming on the fender and a pen borrowed from the landlady's daughter, Mercy, who is seventeen and writes hymns in the back of the stock ledger because her mother no longer allows them in the chapel.

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She reads over your shoulder while you copy the line you cannot shake loose. It is the one your grandmother sang over the washing tub before she died in a rented room in Leeds, the one about a wandering heart. Mercy says the words are wrong. A heart that wanders wants a hook, she says, a nail in a beam, something to tie the thing down to. Her fingers are ink to the wrist and she draws looped capitals in the margin without thinking, the way you might tap a tune on a table.

The thaw comes on the fourth night with a sound like a sheet tearing. In the morning the drifts have slumped and the ostler is harnessing the grey mare, and you close the ledger on the copied page without tearing it out. Mercy stands in the yard with her arms folded against the cold and does not wave.

A mile down the valley the road bends, and you find the page still in your head, the slanted hand, the stubborn last word. You do not carry the ledger. You carry the line instead, which weighs less and holds on better than anything else in your bag.