Black and white photo of a small fine line script tattoo reading love on the side of a finger, with a small paw-like mark beside it.

Small love script on a finger

Lettering · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A close black and white photograph of a small tattoo on the side of a finger, with the word love written in thin, cursive script. A small dark paw-like mark sits to the right of the lettering. The ink is solid black and the soft, dramatic lighting and dark vignette focus attention on the tattoo against the skin.

Lettering Fine line Hand Love Script Paw print

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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

Right, sit down, you'll want the seat by the window for this one, because the story runs up Holloway Road and the street lamps matter. There was a sign-writer in this city called Walter Pask, who painted shop fronts for a living and never once put his own name on anything. He could lay gold leaf on a barber's pole in a single pull of the brush, and he could write a word so fine you'd think the wind had done it. Everyone agreed he had the finest hand in the north.

Keep reading

The winter he turned fifty, a grey lurcher started turning up outside his workshop at dusk. It had a torn ear and one black pad on its near foreleg that printed the wet pavement like a full stop. Walter fed it scraps from the chippy. Every night it sat under the lamp, and every night he painted a little more of a word on the boarded window of the empty shop next door, a word nobody had commissioned. Love, in a looping hand, with a small dark paw beside it like a signature.

Then the landlord came with a bucket and wanted the boards down for a new tenant, and the dog was gone the same week. Walter never learned where it went. He scraped the window clean, kept the stencil in his coat pocket, and stopped taking chips on Thursdays.

Years later a customer came in and asked him for the smallest word he could manage, something she could carry where nobody would see it unless she wanted them to. He took it down to the width of a pencil line, and beside it, at her request, he drew a paw no bigger than a lentil. He told her it was a good dog that chose the spot, and she said she'd take his word for it.