Close-up of a woman's inner forearm with a small black fine-line script tattoo of a few words, placed near the wrist.

Small script tattoo on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with blonde hair rests her forearm across her lap, with a small black script tattoo on the inner arm. The thin, delicate linework forms a short line of cursive lettering, and the tattoo is in black ink on skin with a warm tone. The composition is cropped to the arm and hand, with a white skirt and a gold bangle in the background.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Script Word Cursive

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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 galley on the Ostrander ran hot even in February, and by the second dog watch the porthole above the potato sacks had fogged so thick that Nell could write in it with one finger. She wrote the same three words every night before she went up on deck, a rocking little chant she had picked up from the Genoese cook at Algeciras. I never asked what they meant. On a ship that small, some things are kept for yourself.

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She taught it to the new lad, Tomasz, who could not keep his hands still and kept drumming the rhythm on the steel rail while the kettle sang. Nell told him it was a counting rhyme for knots, and he believed her for a week. I knew better. It was a thing you said to a rope when you wanted it to hold, and the Ostrander had been pulling at her moorings since the autumn gales took the forward winch.

When the Ostrander was broken up at Gateshead in March, I went ashore with a tin of ginger biscuits and my knife roll. The last morning aboard, I came down to the galley before anyone else. The porthole had cleared overnight. Nell's three words had gone, wiped away by the first wave of the day, and the glass showed nothing but grey harbour. My own finger was tapping the rhythm on the rail before I noticed it.