Small black lettering tattoo running vertically along a forearm, with a woven cord bracelet and gold bangle at the wrist.

Small rotated word on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small black word is tattooed vertically along the inside of a forearm, set rotated so it runs from the wrist side towards the elbow. The lettering is crisp, with even, solid black ink and a simple, clean typeface. The skin is warm-toned against a dark, out-of-focus background, and a red and cream woven bracelet and a gold bangle sit at the wrist.

Lettering Forearm Word Lettering Text

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 lift is out again, so you take the stairs from the ninth floor with a carrier bag of Mrs Okafor's onions knocking at your knee, counting landings the way your dad used to count train stations. Someone has written SAZ on the wall of the fourth floor in marker and someone else has crossed it out. Each landing window shows the same grey car park, the same wet sycamore, the same bus shelter with its cracked plastic panel, and you tell yourself the map in the library atlas you nicked last month is still true somewhere.

Keep reading

At the bottom the door sticks, as it always does. Mrs Okafor sits on the bench by the bins with her headscarf knotted and a transistor radio murmuring football. She takes the onions without looking up and asks whether you have sent off the college form. You say yes. You have not. In your back pocket is a folded timetable for the 47, the bus that runs past the hospital and out to the coast, and inside your sock is a ferry crossing you circled in biro until the paper tore.

That night you sit on the balcony rail with the wind pushing at your jumper and copy a word onto the back of your hand in ballpoint, first backwards, then right, until it looks like something a stranger would have to stop and read. Your nan used to say that word was for people who did not know where their feet would land. You took it as a warning.

In the morning the 47 is late, then early, then exactly on time. You get on with the timetable folded small in your fist. Past the hospital the flats thin into hedges, and the sea appears grey and sudden between two fields. You press your forehead to the glass and feel the word on your forearm go warm, the way it does when you have decided something you have not yet told anyone.