Close-up of a small black fine line tattoo reading "it is well" in a typewriter style font on the inner forearm, with a woman in a striped top standing in a grassy field.

Small "it is well" lettering on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows the words "it is well" in lowercase, typewriter style lettering, tattooed in black ink on the inner forearm. The linework is thin and even, with no shading, and the text sits horizontally across the arm. The background is a dry grassy field with white wildflowers, and the subject's face is out of frame.

Lettering Fine line Forearm Text Phrase

Find an artist for this

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 telegraph wire ran down from the pass in a single grey line, and every evening at six the bell on Corinna Vell's desk rang twice before the first message came clattering through. Most were short. Her task was to copy each one onto the typewriter in capitals, fold it into an envelope and send a boy running up the Marrow Road with it. The Queen had decreed that no family in Harrowmere should learn of a loss from a stranger's face, so the names came first, and the rest followed.

Keep reading

The night the river flooded the lower garrison, the wire went quiet for an hour and then began again with a column of names she did not want to type. Halfway down was a boy called Tobin Ferrars, who had eaten his supper at her kitchen table the week before. After the names came a single line from his sergeant, and it held only three words: it is well. Corinna frowned at the phrase. It was not a report. It was a kindness dressed as one, and the sergeant had sent it knowing every office on the road would read it.

She copied it exactly, letter by letter, as the regulations required. Then she sat looking at the lowercase words, which no clerk in the building would ever think to set down. Taking a fresh sheet, she typed Tobin's mother's name at the top and beneath it, in her own careful hand, the same three words. Nobody checked the envelopes after dark. The boy ran up the road with it, and the bell stayed silent until morning.

At first light the wire brought a correction. Tobin had been pulled from the water under an overturned cart, cold and furious and alive. Corinna read it twice, then rolled a clean sheet into the machine and began the next name on the list, the keys striking steadily under her fingers, leaving a line of small black letters where the ink had not yet dried.