Two side-by-side photos of black script lettering reading I'm Fine on the back of a knee and Save Me on a calf, with the foot raised in the second image.

Script words "I'm Fine" and "Save Me" on legs

Lettering · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

The left photo shows black script lettering reading "I'm Fine" on the back of a leg near the knee, and the right photo shows black script reading "Save Me" on the lower leg with the foot raised. Both tattoos are shaded in solid black ink with smooth, clean letterforms and no other colour. The two photographs sit side by side in a diptych, with plain backgrounds of a bed and a grey carpet.

Lettering Calf Script Word Leg Foot

Find an artist for this

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 closer, the stove is going out and I am too old to kneel to it again. You want the story of the sign-painters at Kessen Bridge? Then hold your tea and mind the draught. Hilde Brandt painted the boards either side of the toll gate, the notices about tolls and river levels, and her younger sister Marit did the lettering, because Marit had the steadier hand and the worse temper.

Keep reading

The winter the ice came early, Marit's husband was held on the far bank with a cart full of other men's papers, and the only news to reach the east side was a rumour that he would be shot for a misread line. Hilde took a slate from the shed and painted in her neatest script, I'm Fine, and hung it where the sentry could see it across the water. Marit, who had no patience for her sister's neatness, scratched the other slate in a hurry, leaning on a barrel, and told Hilde to hang it facing the river so the ice would carry the words over.

The sentry, a boy called Andris who could only read capitals, carried the slates to his captain, who held the first one to the lamp and found nothing wrong with it. The second he held up to the window, where the glass turned it the right way round: Save Me. The captain crossed the bridge himself at dawn with a dozen men, and the husband walked back over the ice with the cracks singing under him.

Hilde still keeps those slates on a nail by the door. Turn one over and you will see Marit's letters the way she meant them, backwards, as if they were written for water. That is the only trick in the trade, my love. Say what you mean, then let someone else hold it up to the light.