Fine black script lettering tattooed across the back of a hand beside white coffin-shaped nails and a gold watch.

Script word tattoo on the back of a hand

Lettering · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a hand with a thin black script word tattooed across the back, running from the knuckles towards the wrist. The linework is fine and even, with the ink in black and grey only. The hand rests against a pale background with a gold link watch and a mint knit sleeve, and the white glossy nails are the main colour in the frame.

Lettering Fine line Hand Script Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gold leaf had lifted again on the second S, and Edith Farrow swore at it under her breath while the tide came in grey beyond the harbour wall. Mr Pell wanted his bakery fascia finished by Saturday, and the sign-writer's trade in Whitstable was thinning year by year, as surely as the ink in her brushes. She laid another thin skin of size, waited until it went tacky, and pressed the leaf down with a square of cotton wool.

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A young woman had come in the week before with a folded scrap of paper, asking for one word in script, small enough to sit on the back of a hand. She would not say why. She only wanted the letters fine, almost a whisper of a line, and she paid in coins from a purse with a broken clasp. Edith wrote it out four times before the strokes looked right, sitting on the stool by the window where the light was best, and the woman watched her hands the whole time as if they might change their minds.

The bakery sign went up on Saturday morning. Mr Pell stood under it with his arms folded and said it looked like money. Edith said nothing, because she had been thinking about the young woman, and about how that word would look in ten years, grey at the edges, the way old paint softens on a boat.

Three summers later a postcard arrived with no return address. It showed the harbour wall. On the back, in pencil, someone had written only: the line held. Edith pinned it above her bench, beside the scrap of paper she had kept, and went on lettering other people's names.