Close-up of a small black lettering tattoo in blackletter style running vertically along the inside of a forearm, with a woven bracelet and a gold band above it.

Small blackletter word on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small word is tattooed vertically along the forearm in black ink, set in a blackletter style with pointed, angular strokes. The lettering is crisp and fine, with even weight and sits on the lower forearm near the elbow. The photograph is taken at a shallow angle with a blurred dark background, and the skin tone and bracelets are the main colour.

Lettering Forearm Lettering Word Script Blackletter

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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

Now sit yourself down by the range and mind the kettle, because this is a long one and I'll not tell it twice. There was a lad in Tresmere called Owen Pascoe, and he had one thing his father never had, which was a pair of legs that wanted to go somewhere. Every shift the cage dropped him three hundred fathoms into the dark, and every shift he stood at the bottom with his lamp and looked along the drift the way other men look at the sea.

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His aunt had married a ship's cook from the far side of the county, and she sent him a letter once, folded small, with a word written across the back in a hand so old-fashioned it looked like wrought iron. The word was adventure, with a curl at the tail of every letter like a fern uncoiling. Owen could not read that hand well, so he carried the paper down with him and sat at the face in the lamplight, trying to make the letters give up their meaning. The older men laughed and said it was a word for fools and foreigners.

In the spring a travelling inker came through on the carrier's cart, a quiet man with bottles in a leather roll. Owen paid him two shillings and had the word pricked into the inside of his forearm, running up from the elbow, so he could read it whenever he wanted and never have to unfold the paper again. The inker wiped the blood away and said the word would be there when everything else had gone.

That autumn the roof came down in the old workings, and the cage stopped for three days. When they finally broke through, the men found a passage no one had mapped, sloping upward and smelling of salt. Owen was never seen again in Tresmere, though my own grandmother swore she saw him on the cliff path at dawn, lamp out, walking towards a sea that had never been there before.