Black and grey fine line script reading serendipity on the inner forearm, photographed in black and white.

Serendipity script on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A thin, single-line script word, which appears to read serendipity, sits across the inner forearm. The linework is delicate and even, with fine strokes and a few looping flourishes. The image is black and white, with the tattoo centred against soft skin tones and a dark background on the left.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Script Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The patron wants the word on the first page of the book, and he wants it written in the flowing hand of the Basra scribes, so you sit with your reed and a pot of ink that has already thickened in the heat. You were hired to copy the tale of the three princes of Serendip, who set out to find a lost camel and found instead a kingdom, a bride and a better sense of themselves. The patron calls the kind of luck they stumbled into by a name he cannot pronounce, so he asks you to write it the way the island sounds.

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You try three versions. The first looks like a fishing net dragged through sand. The second has too many hooks and the third too few, and the ink bleeds into the grain of the vellum like wine on a sleeve. You are about to scrape the page when the dyer's boy from the courtyard pushes through the curtain, looking for lamp oil and finding instead a grown man swearing at a sheet of goatskin. He does not ask what you are doing. He leans over the table and traces the fourth attempt with one damp finger, his lips moving over the shapes.

He says it sounds like the bell on the water-seller's cart, which hangs from a thread that always slips and then holds. You laugh, and the laugh jerks the nib sideways, and the stroke that results loops back on itself in a way you would never have planned. When the patron comes at dusk he stands over the page for a long time, then pays you in silver and tells you to leave it exactly as it is.