Close-up of a wrist with a small fine line script tattoo reading alive in dark ink, shown in a soft focus film photograph.

Script word alive on a wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A hand rests on a pale surface with the wrist turned towards the camera, and a small cursive word reading alive sits on the wrist in dark ink. The linework is thin and even, and the ink appears as a single dark tone with no colour. The background and fingers are out of focus, so the tattoo is the sharpest element in a muted, grainy composition.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Script 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

Dear Lysandra, the harbour clerk sent back my manifest again today with the same complaint scratched in the margin: the ink has run. I told him the ink is honest, it is the scribe who tires. After forty years of cutting the names of dead men onto their stones, I can draft a funeral notice faster than a cook guts a mackerel, and I have stopped looking up while I do it.

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Yesterday a widow brought me a folded sheet of papyrus and asked for one word only, to be cut beneath her husband's name. She had chosen it herself and would not say why. I wrote it out for her in the slanting hand we use for the cheap stones, loops tight, strokes so thin the mason would have to squint. The word was zon, which means simply alive. She studied it a long while, then asked whether I could make it look as though it had been written in a hurry, by someone who expected to be back before dark.

I did not sleep well. At first light I took a reed and a pot of lamp soot down to the quay and wrote the word again on a flat grey slate, just to see whether my line would hold steady. It did. Then I sat on a bollard and watched the fishermen haul their nets, their shouting carried clean across the water, and for an hour I did not count a single letter.

The widow's stone was set last week. I went to see it this morning, and the word was there, small and quick, as if it had been dashed off between one errand and the next. I stood in the dust until the sun was over the wall, then went home to finish my own work, which is still, as far as I know, unfinished.