Fine line tattoo design of the word smile in single-stroke script, joined to a thin black line that ends in a small dot at each side.

Smile script on a continuous line

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A black line drawing on a white background showing the word smile written in a continuous, looping script. The thin line extends from a dot on the left, runs through the lettering and ends in a matching dot on the right. The linework is uniform and solid, with no shading, and the composition is centred and horizontal.

Fine line Lettering Smile Script Line

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

You are counting steps again, one-two-three, under the chandeliers of the Marrowgate Ballroom, when Mr Fenwick taps his baton twice on the piano lid and says the thing he says every Saturday. Not the foxtrot. Not the rise. Smile, he says, as if the word were a step too.

Keep reading

You have been practising the wrong face for a month. Your mouth goes tight whenever a partner's hand lands on your back, and you can feel the chalk line running under your heels, the one that marks the lane from the left-hand pillar to the right. Mr Fenwick laid it himself in 1953 with a length of string and a stub of chalk, and he says a good lead should run as clean as that, start to finish, with no lifting.

On the Saturday of the Harvest Waltz, Dorothy Slack, who has danced with the same man for twenty-two years, leans in and tells you the trick is to think of something funny only to you. So you think of the coalman's dog, which once ran the length of Cornmarket with a kipper in its mouth, and the corners of your mouth loosen without asking. Your feet keep time. The band keeps time. Nobody tells you that you have stopped counting.

At midnight Mr Fenwick lifts the string down from its nail and winds it round his fist. He does not say well done. He only tips his chin at the floor, where the chalk has rubbed away everywhere except one stretch under your heels, and you realise the line was always going to end there, where you were smiling.