Close-up of a hand gripping a black camera, with the word Smile in small black script lettering tattooed on a finger.

Smile lettering on a finger

Lettering · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A hand grips a black Canon camera body, with the word Smile written in black script across the top segment of one finger. The lettering has clean, solid black linework and the photograph is taken with a dark background and soft light on the skin. The composition is tight, focusing on the finger and the camera lens at the right of the frame.

Lettering Hand Smile Camera Hand Script

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

Hollis had photographed half of Saltmere in thirty years, and none of them had ever refused him outright until the Pargeter boy came up the lane with his cap crushed in both hands. "Smile, then," Hollis said. The boy's jaw set like a farm gate. "My mother says I've my father's face when I grin, and my father went to Hull and never wrote."

Keep reading

Hollis wiped the glass eye of his black camera with a corner of his waistcoat and considered this. He had a rule he had never put on paper: a photograph is only as honest as the face that gives it. So he did not argue. He took the pencil from behind his ear, licked the lead, and wrote a single word in capitals across the top of the boy's finger, the way travelling showmen marked their tickets. The boy looked down at it, puzzled, and read it aloud. "Smile."

"That's not an order," Hollis said. "It's a promise. Every time you look at that word, you'll have to decide whether you mean it." The boy turned his hand over and back, frowning, and then something gave at the corner of his mouth, the way ice goes on a pond when a stone lands on it. He laughed. Hollis pressed the shutter.

The print came up three days later in the darkroom under the coal shed, grey and rough at the edges. The boy's mother pinned it above the range without a word and never asked where the pencil mark had gone. Hollis kept the negative, and the pencil, and the one thing he never told anyone: the word had been for himself, because he had not smiled in years and had grown careless about remembering how it was done.