Small black script tattoo on the side of a finger in a fine line style, with a thin gold ring nearby and white roses behind.

Small script tattoo on a finger

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A close view of a hand with a small black tattoo of stylised characters across the side of one finger. The linework is thin and even, with solid black ink and no visible shading. The warm wooden background, fern sprigs and white roses are in soft focus, and the hand has pale green nail polish and thin gold rings.

Fine line Lettering Hand Script Character Finger Ring

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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

Sit closer, the lamps are low and my voice carries only so far before the night watch starts counting it. For forty years I wrote letters for the people of Tanner's Lane, because most of them could not, and the ones who could did not trust their own hands with what they meant. A woman came to my step one wet October with a folded sheet and a boy holding her sleeve. She wanted one word written and nothing else, and she would not say what it meant.

Keep reading

I took her paper and my finest nib and asked what the word was for. She said it was for a man who had gone north with the cloth boats and never sent word back. I wrote it slowly, the strokes thin as the hair on a moth's leg. When I had finished she read it and laughed, a short sound like a dropped spoon. It was not his name, she said. It was the word her mother used when she was small and frightened, the word that meant hold still, the river is only passing.

She paid me in copper and walked off into the rain without the letter. The boy came back an hour later with the paper balled in his fist, soaked to pulp, and he asked me to write it again. I told him the ink had gone where ink goes. He nodded as if that were an answer, then pointed at the black water under the bridge.

So keep your words short when you send them, and keep them where the rain cannot reach. The river takes most things, but it has never once managed to read.