Collage of fine line script tattoos on an upper arm, forearm, wrist and neck, reading words such as love, smile, soul and live fearless.

Script words on arms, wrist and neck

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

This collage shows eight close-up photographs of single-word and short-phrase script tattoos on arms, a wrist and the back of the neck. The lettering is thin, monochrome linework in black ink, with some pieces appearing as flowing cursive and others as neat, joined handwriting. Each photo is tightly framed on the skin, with the text set against plain backgrounds and clothing.

Lettering Fine line Upper arm Forearm Neck Script Lettering Love Smile 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

Sit down, then, on the bench where the sun's still warm. You want the story of the copybook, not the shed. My grandmother, Ada Penhallow, kept a school exercise book under the potting bench, gone soft as cloth, and every page held the same few words written over and over in brown ink: love, smile, soul, live fearless. She'd learned her hand from a nun in Penzance who rapped knuckles for a blot.

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The summer the apples failed, a travelling clerk came up the lane selling nibs and rubber stamps. He had a leather case of tiny steel pens and a way of writing so quick the letters seemed to run off the page. Ada watched him sign the vicar's register, then asked him to write one word on the back of her hand. He wrote soul, and it sat there all afternoon while she shelled peas, fading to a shadow but never quite going.

When the clerk was gone she found her own hand had changed. The letters leaned forward as if walking into a wind. She filled the copybook with them, and when the frost came she pressed the pages between the bricks of the cold frame so the ink would hold through winter. In spring the seedlings came up straight through the words.

Her hand came back to her in the end, small and neat, joined as if nothing had ever broken it. She wrote one more line that last autumn, beneath all the rest, and I've never read it aloud. She used pencil, which fades slowest of all, and left it for whoever dug the bed next.