Close up of a fine line black script tattoo of the word free across the back of a hand, with turquoise rings and a denim shirt in view.

Script word free on the hand

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A close up of a hand with the word free written in thin black script, running diagonally across the back of the hand. The linework is fine and even, in a single black tone with no shading. Turquoise rings, a beaded bracelet and a light blue denim shirt sit around the edges of the frame.

Fine line Lettering Hand Free Script Word Hand

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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 down, the lot of you, and mind the lamp, it's the last of the good oil. In my grandmother's day nobody had to ask for the word. It was on the tins and the shop signs and the sides of the buses that ran along the coast road before the sea came up over it. By the time the archive at Runcorn burned, the word had gone thin as a hair on a wet window, and only the old folk still said it, and they said it quietly, the way you'd mention a dead cousin.

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Ada Penrose kept the tide-gate at the mouth of the Dee, back when there were still gates and keepers and a council that wrote letters about them. She had ink on her fingers from the ledgers and a habit of writing things on her hand so she wouldn't lose them. One spring a man in a grey coat came down the causeway with papers to say the gate would be sealed and the village moved inland to the grain hall. He had seals of his own. She had the tide tables. She looked at him for a long while, then uncapped her pen and wrote the word across the back of her hand, the letters slanting down toward her wrist in a fine, quick script. 'You can have the gate,' she told him. 'You cannot have that.'

They sealed the gate. The sea came anyway, and so did the rowing boats, and Ada was the one who knew which channels still ran under the drowned churchyard. The ink washed away in the salt within a year, as ink does. But she had taught the word to every child on that stretch of shore by then, pressed it into them like a shell into wet sand, and that's why I can say it to you now. Go on. Say it back to me. Louder, the way she'd have wanted, so the wind can hear it.