Black and white photo of fine line script lettering reading Live with a semicolon, placed on the inner forearm.

Script word Live on the inner forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows a small fine line tattoo of the script word Live, with a semicolon-like mark beneath the L. The lettering uses thin, even black linework with a looping, flowing stroke. The image is black and white, with the design centred against a pale forearm on a dark background.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Script Word Semicolon

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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 café on Quay Street wanted one word on its window, and nothing else. Walter Pym had painted shop fascias in Whitby for thirty-one years, and he knew the hardest part of a single word is the space around it, so he spent the first morning on an upturned crate with a flask of stewed tea, watching the gulls fight over the bins while the glass dried in the sea wind.

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The owner, a widow called Marian Holt, had sent him a sketch on the back of a receipt: LIVE, the letters looping into each other like rope. Walter liked the L best. He had learned lettering from old Tobias Greave, who kept his samples in a biscuit tin, and tucked inside the back cover was a single page in faded ink showing a small curved stroke with a dot above it. Beneath it Tobias had written, in his cramped hand, 'For the sentence that has not finished yet.'

Walter had never once used it. Customers wanted full stops, bold stops, the clean ends of things. He mixed the gold size, laid his brush against the glass and drew the L in one unbroken breath, the tail swinging down and out. Then he stopped, dipped the finest sable he owned and set the small mark beneath the curve, as neat as a comma that had decided to stay.

Marian came out with two cups of tea and stood on the pavement, squinting up at the window. 'What's that little thing?' she asked. Walter wiped his brush on a rag and considered the question for longer than it deserved. 'It means the sentence carries on,' he said, and went back to the other letters, which needed no explanation at all.