Close-up of a fine line black script tattoo reading serendipity on a forearm, against a blurred colourful background.

Serendipity script on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close-up photograph of the word serendipity written in thin, black, cursive script across the arm. The linework is delicate and even, with slight variation in stroke weight. The skin tone is neutral and the background is a soft-focus, multicoloured artwork, which keeps attention on the lettering.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Script Word Cursive

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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 ladder is still leaning against the Bramley when you come back up the row, and the light has gone the colour of weak tea. You had only come out for the secateurs. Instead you find a wooden crate under the hedge, its slats swollen from a week of rain, and inside it a jam jar wrapped in a page torn from a seed catalogue. The label is in pencil: Mum's damson, 1979. Someone has gone over the date again in ink, as if to be sure.

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Nobody in the cottage knows about the crate. Your aunt sold the lease last spring to a man from Hereford who wants the trees out by October, and the place has been half-packed ever since, boxes labelled in three different hands. You sit on the wet step and unwrap the jar. The damsons have gone to dark leather, floating in syrup that has turned amber at the top. It should be spoiled. It is not. Under the sugar there is a sharpness that makes you laugh out loud at nothing, alone in the grass.

You carry it inside and set it on the windowsill beside the others, and behind it you find a second note in a looping hand: Don't open until you need it. You open the jar anyway, and then you open the note again, because there is more on the back. Go and look under the hedge on the eastern side. You do. There is another crate, and another jar, and beneath them a folded map of the orchard with every good row numbered in green ink.

You spread the map across the kitchen table and trace the rows with one finger, row by row, past the plum walk and down to the old wall where the ground dips. Beside row nine she has drawn a small star and written, in the same steady hand, Start here, and the kettle clicks on behind you as though it has been waiting too.