Close-up of a fine-line black script tattoo reading smile across the inner wrist, with a grey sleeve and soft pink blurred background.

Smile script tattoo on a wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close-up photograph of the inner wrist and forearm of a person wearing a grey sleeve. The single word smile is written in thin, black, cursive script that wraps across the wrist, with the final stroke trailing towards the outer edge. The linework is delicate and even, the ink is solid black with no shading, and the soft-focus pink background keeps attention on the tattoo.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Smile Script Word Wrist

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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

Come closer, the lamps are poor down this end, and I've never told this one with a crowd listening. Sit on the crate, love. Mind the wet. Up the hill from the old tram sheds there was a wire-bender called Abel Crouch, who made hooks for the fishmongers and hairpins for the milliners. Every winter he bent one thing that wasn't for selling.

Keep reading

The clockmaker's daughter on Pell Street had stopped smiling the year her mother died. Her father, Mr Oddie, came to Abel's workshop after closing with a sixpence and a request he could hardly say aloud. Make her something small, he said, something she can wear and forget she's wearing, that tells her what I can't.

Abel worked three nights with a spool of fine black wire, bending the letters close and easy, the way a man writes when no one is watching. He ran the final stroke out long, so it would trail past the bone and lie flat against the skin. When he handed it over he said, it will not come off unless you want it to, and that is the whole trick of it.

She wore it till she was old. And the thing I always tell the children is this: the word was never the magic. It was the stroke at the end, that little flick towards the edge, because that was where the girl would look when she wanted to remember her mother laughing, and she always, always found herself smiling there.