Black and white photo of a tiny fine line capital letter M tattoo on the inner forearm near the wrist.

Small letter M on the inner forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of a forearm and hand raised near the chin, with the face cropped out of frame and a dark knitted top behind. A small capital letter M sits on the inner forearm just above the wrist, drawn in thin black linework with simple solid strokes. The close, centred composition keeps the tattoo small within the frame.

Lettering Fine line Forearm Initial

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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 punch for the capital M went missing the same week the river froze over, and Oriel Vance, who had kept the type-room at Saltmarsh Press for thirty-one years, took it as a personal insult. Every other letter in the case was accounted for. The A, the B and the cracked K we kept for luck all lay in their wooden drawers like sleeping hens. Only the M had gone walking.

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My daughter found it, though she did not know what she had found. She was sorting scrap brass for the furnace and came up the ladder with a palm-sized disc of blackened metal, the letter cut into it backwards and perfect. 'Is this a key?' she asked. I told her it was the only thing in the building that could spell a proper name, which was half a lie, because the M was the letter her grandmother had stamped on every ration slip in the years after the floods, and I had never bothered to explain that to anyone.

We inked the plate that evening with the last of the lamp oil and pulled a single proof on cotton paper that had come down from the old mills. The letter came up dark and clean at the edges, a fraction heavier than the others, as if whoever cut it had meant to be remembered. Beneath it, in pencil faded to grey, someone had written a list of names: Mabel, Ruth, Idris, Mo, Margit. Each began with that same shape. Oriel stood at the bench a long time before she said we should put the punch back in its drawer, and I understood she wanted to keep one thing in the room that belonged to somebody else.

I still have the proof. It hangs above the bench where the high window throws its light at noon, and the M sits near the middle of the sheet, small enough that a visitor might walk straight past it. My daughter says it looks like a bird coming down to land. Oriel says it looks like a door left ajar. I think it looks like a letter nobody sent, waiting for the right hand to pick it up.