Small dark script word tattoo on the forearm near the wrist, with a woven bracelet, resting on red and grey plaid bedding.

Small script word tattoo on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A forearm and open hand rest on a red, grey and white plaid cloth. A small, single-line script word sits on the forearm close to the wrist, with a woven bracelet on the wrist beside it. The linework is thin and the ink appears dark grey or blue-black against the skin, with the photograph taken from above in soft, natural light.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Script Word Bracelet

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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

Old Tobiah Crane kept his word where the crew could see it, small and slanted on the inside of his forearm, because a man at sea forgets his own name before he forgets a promise. He had inked it the spring the Wren left Bristol, when the ledger was full of debts and the boy he had sworn to bring home was twelve and crying in the forecastle.

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The voyage ran long. Calms soaked the sails and rotted the water casks, and a fever took two hands off the Cape run. Each night Tobiah sat with the boy, Josiah, and taught him knots by lamplight. Whenever Tobiah reached for the lantern, the word caught the light. Josiah asked once what it said. "Stay," said Tobiah. "Stay what?" the boy asked. "That's the whole of it. It's a word that wants an answer."

In the doldrums Josiah slipped from the yard, and Tobiah went up the rigging faster than he had moved in years, though the sea was flat as a plate and the boy only had a bruised shoulder to show for it. When they came into Bristol the following autumn, Josiah took his sea chest and walked up the quay without turning round. Tobiah stood at the rail until the crowd thinned, then went below and found his arm had gone pale in the damp, the ink nearly lost.

Two winters later a letter came to the Wren's agent, addressed in a careful, looping hand. Inside was a single line of ink, a word Tobiah had never shown anyone but the boy. Underneath, Josiah had written, "I stayed." Tobiah read it twice, then sat on a coil of rope and laughed until the mate came to see what was wrong.