Close up of a fine line black script tattoo reading life imitates art along the forearm of a bare arm.

Script quote on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A bare forearm is raised with the fist clenched at the right of the frame, showing a thin black script that reads life imitates art. The linework is fine and even, with the letters slightly slanted and joined in a continuous cursive flow. The plain pale background keeps focus on the ink, which is solid black with no shading or colour.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Script Quote Text

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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 door of the lamp room at Scarrow Point had been repainted so many times that the old lettering had gone soft under the gloss. Old Vance, who had lettered the tower's first sign, left me a tin of black enamel, a number two sable and a card with four words written in his looping hand. Copy them exactly, he said, and don't tidy the joins. I had been his apprentice since spring and had learned that he never explained anything twice.

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I painted the words on a grey Tuesday with spray pushing up the cliff. The letters ran into one another the way his always did, slanted slightly, as if they were leaning in to hear something. When I finished, he came up the spiral stairs on his stick, studied the door for a long time, and then told me about the painting hanging in the Harbour Inn: a lighthouse in a squall, lamp dark, the gallery rail bent like a broken finger. He had painted it the winter before the real rail buckled in the same gale.

"So the sea read your picture," I said. He laughed, which he rarely did. "I painted the thing I was afraid of, and then I stopped being afraid of it." He tapped the card with one knuckle. "Life imitates art. Nobody believes it until the rail goes."

That night the lamp failed at ten, as the schedule warned. I climbed up with a torch expecting the worst and found the bulb fine and the rail sound. Vance was asleep in the chair below. On the lamp room door the black words shone wet in the beam, and I could no longer tell which of us had been copying whom.