Black and white photo of the fine line script word smile tattooed on the side of a pointing finger.

Smile script on a finger

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A woman's hand points towards the camera with a small tattoo of the word smile in cursive script on the side of the index finger. The linework is thin and even, with little shading. The image is black and white, and the soft background shows a blurred indoor setting while the hair falls across the upper frame.

Fine line Lettering Hand Smile Script Word

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

Sit closer, because the tent's gone and my voice is all that's left of Dunne's Travelling Marvels, and I'll not have you missing the bit where the money ran out. Nineteen fifty-eight, that was. The last winter at Cleethorpes, the canvas rotting like wet bread, and old Arthur Mallory sitting on an upturned crate with a bent needle and a pot of Indian ink.

Keep reading

Arthur had been a clown for forty years and had never once been funny at home. So each morning he pricked the word SMILE into the side of his forefinger, letters small enough to hide under a glove, thin lines neat as stitching. He said it was so he'd always know which way to point. Point at the children in the front row. Point at the one man who looked like he'd stopped coming to anything.

By the last Saturday there were eleven people in a tent built for four hundred. Arthur walked the ring in his cracked white face, and when the lamp sputtered he pointed at the empty benches, one by one, the way his father had taught him. A girl in a red coat stood up near the back. She didn't laugh. She only looked at the word on his finger, then at his face, and copied it with her own mouth.

Arthur never worked another season. When the scrapman came for the poles, he saw the old clown standing in the rain, finger raised at the wet field, and swore the ink had gone grey but the word still said what it was meant to. Ask me what became of the girl. I couldn't tell you. But I know she grinned back, and I know he kept pointing.