Blue-grey handwritten quote and a line drawing of a serotonin molecule tattooed on a forearm, with a small bird at the bottom edge.

Serotonin molecule and quote on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo has three handwritten lines of text reading "well please dont be surprised when you find me dreaming too", with a line-drawn molecule in the middle that resembles the serotonin structure, a fused ring with a side chain ending in nitrogen and oxygen groups. The lettering and molecule are drawn in uniform, thin blue-grey lines with no shading, and a partial bird outline sits at the bottom edge of the frame. The ink is a single muted tone on skin, shown in a close, slightly angled photo of the forearm.

Lettering Forearm Lettering Quote Molecule Chemical structure Bird

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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

Every Thursday the rain came down on the fish market at Harrowgate, and every Thursday the old woman with blue-grey ink on her knuckles set up her stall between the eel barrels and the man who sold clocks. She sold sleep. Not the thing itself, she was clear about that, but small paper twists of it: dried lavender, chamomile, and a pinch of something bitter she would never name.

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A lad called Tobias came up the slope one wet morning carrying a sparrow in a cloth bag. He said it had stopped singing. He wanted to know why, and he had no money, so he offered the bird instead.

She took the bag, looked at the sparrow, then at the sky, which was the colour of a dirty spoon. "Birds dream as well as we do," she said. "More, maybe, because nobody lets them finish one. Go home. Open the window. Leave the bird on the sill and do not sleep until it sings."

He did as he was told, and the sparrow sang before dawn. When he came back to the market with a coin and a question, the stall was gone. In its place a grey bird sat on the rail, watching the rain with one bright eye, and under a stone beside it lay a scrap of paper in careful handwriting: well please dont be surprised when you find me dreaming too.