Close-up of a small black lettering tattoo in Arabic script on the inner wrist of a hand resting on a steering wheel.

Small Arabic script tattoo on wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A hand rests on a car steering wheel, showing a small tattoo of Arabic script in black ink on the inner wrist. The letterforms are bold and slightly stylised, with solid black lines and no visible shading. The photograph is taken indoors in the car, with a gold wristwatch and a steering wheel badge in the background.

Lettering Forearm Arabic script Script Word Wrist tattoo

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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 gold leaf was still tacky when Mr Haddad came back from Leicester, so he stood on the pavement in the drizzle and read the window from the outside, the way a man reads a letter he already knows by heart. I had painted the word in the old hand his father once used, each stroke heavy at the base and tapering to a fine tail, the kind of lettering that makes a street look older than it is.

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He had come to me in February with a cracked photograph of a shopfront in Bradford, taken in 1979, and a single request. "Make it look like it was always here." The original sign had gone the year the building was gutted, and nobody had kept so much as a corner of it. I spent three weeks with that photograph under a lamp, tracing the curve of each letter from grainy shadows and mixing a black enamel that would not shine too much in the rain. My brushes were older than my van. I worked standing up, which my back has never forgiven.

On the last morning he asked me to lift the final letter a fraction, so it leaned out towards the road. "He did that," he said. "Every time he finished a word, he gave it a little nudge, as if he was sending it out of the door." I told him the photograph didn't show it, and he said he knew. Then he took a folded copy of the same picture from his inside pocket, pressed it flat against the glass and moved it until the old letter lined up with the new one.

They matched. Not perfectly, because hands never repeat themselves, but close enough that a stranger would see only one name. He tapped the glass twice with two fingers, the way you knock on a door you expect someone to open, and went inside to put the kettle on.