Close photo of a black script tattoo reading We're all mad here across a forearm, with a blue beaded bracelet on the wrist.

Script quote on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black script tattoo spells out the words We're all mad here in flowing, joined letters across the inner forearm. The linework is smooth and even, with the ink in solid black and no shading or colour. The arm fills the frame diagonally against a patterned quilt, with a blue beaded bracelet at the upper right.

Lettering Forearm Quote Script Word

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 man who ordered the lettering wanted it in the hand his late wife had used on her recipe cards, joined and looping, so that nobody reading it could tell where one word stopped and the next began. I told him that was the whole trick of script. He said he had never wanted to be read easily. I charged him double for the brushwork and he paid in coppers, counted out slowly on my bench.

Keep reading

The board was for the back door of the Dormouse, a tea room above the canal where Mrs Hesketh kept a tabby called Sunday who sat in the window watching the water. She wanted something that would make the regulars laugh and the environmental health man frown. I suggested the cat's line. She said it was too obvious. I said obvious is what a sign is for, and she laughed so hard she had to sit down on a flour sack.

I had the gold size tacky and the first word half drawn when the bell over my door rang and a girl of about nine came in dripping, asking whether it would be dry before the rain. She read my unfinished board upside down, moving her finger along the joins. "Everyone's mad here," she said. "Is that what it says?" I told her it said we're all mad here. She looked at the blank space after the last word as though somebody had left a door open.

I finished the apostrophe that night, a small tail curling up like a question. Mrs Hesketh hung the board on the Monday, and by spring a sparrow had built behind it. The girl still walks past each morning to check. I have never told her that the apostrophe is the hardest mark in a joined hand, because you must leave it room to hang over the edge of the letters, and most people, given the choice, leave no room at all.