Black script lettering reading I am not afraid, I was born to do this across the inner forearm, in a lettering style, with a skull bracelet worn on the wrist.

Script quote tattoo on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows a black script tattoo across the inner forearm, set in two lines that read I am not afraid and I was born to do this. The monoline lettering is smooth and even, with a slight slant and clean, consistent stroke weight. The ink is solid black against light skin, and the cropped composition is shot close up with ripped denim and a skull bracelet in the background.

Lettering Forearm Quote Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had been coming sideways across the car park since seven, and by half past nine the tarpaulin over my stall at Eastgate Market was sagging in the middle like a hammock holding a bucket. I was rearranging a tray of second-hand chisels for the third time when Mrs Hallam from the wool stall came splashing over with a carrier bag on her head and asked whether I still had Frank's brushes.

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Frank had been the sign writer on Chapel Street for thirty years. Every fascia between the bank and the bakery was his work, black monoline letters leaning a fraction to the right, never a wobble in the stroke. When he died in March, his brushes came to me in a biscuit tin because Mrs Hallam said I was the only one in the market who would not sell them for scrap. Now the council wanted his oldest shopfront painted over, and she had found a cardboard offcut in his workshop with two lines in pencil across it. She had not been able to read them without crying, so she read them to me instead.

I am not afraid. I was born to do this.

I took the smallest sable from the tin, the handle still wrapped in the tape he used for everything, and practised on a wet board while the rain drummed the tarpaulin above me. My first attempt sloped like a dropped umbrella. The second had a blot on the downstroke. By the sixth I had his rhythm in my wrist, the slow pull and the quick lift, and the letters began to stand up straight.

The rain stopped at eleven. Mrs Hallam held the offcut flat under her palm while I worked, and when I finished she did not say anything. I wiped the brush on my sleeve and leaned the board against the tarpaulin to dry, the ink still shining, the two lines running out into the grey light.