Black script lettering tattoo on the upper arm of a woman in a pale pink dress with sheer sleeves, photographed from behind.

Script tattoo on upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A close view from behind shows a fine black script tattoo running down the outer upper arm, with a second faint mark above it near the shoulder. The lettering uses thin, even lines in solid black ink with no shading. The pale pink dress, sheer sleeves and row of covered buttons down the back fill most of the frame, and the tattoo sits on the left side of the image.

Lettering Upper arm Script Lettering Word

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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

Sit yourself on the upturned crate, love, the bench is for paying customers. Ada Pickering had her words put on her arm by a sign-writer in Hull before the war, and she carried them about for forty years the way other women carry a purse. Nobody ever saw the whole of it. Brass lamps, a dancing bear called Duke, a hall of mirrors that swallowed a boy's shoe. That was the Pennington Brothers' Travelling Fair, and Ada ran the pie stall at the back, where the lights gave out.

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Every August the fair came to the same meadow above the Wear, and every August a lad from the village came round asking after her. Tom Harker, with eyes like wet slate, who never finished a sentence without looking at the grass. He wanted to know where she had been all year, and she gave him a different town each time, because a lie told kindly is a sort of gift.

The last summer the fair came, a gale tore the big top's sign off its poles and it landed face down in the mud. Tom fished it out and turned it over before he handed it back. Nobody ever knew what he read on the reverse. Ada only knew he walked her home without a word, and at the gate he took a pencil stub from his pocket and wrote something small on the back of her hand, then rubbed at it with his thumb.

The ink stayed anyway, the way cheap ink does, and she never did tell him what it said. Pennington's went under the following spring, the bear was sold to a zoo in Leeds, and Ada kept her pie recipe and her sleeves rolled down. Mind the rope on your way out.