Fine line black lettering reading smitten runs vertically along a forearm as the hand holds a white phone against a white skirt and brick wall.

Smitten script on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A single word, smitten, is written in thin black cursive script running vertically along the forearm. The linework is delicate and even, with a flowing tail on the final letters and no shading. The arm is held against a white skirt and a pale brick wall, with a white phone showing a grid of photos in the hand.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Script Word Cursive

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit down, and mind the lamp. Tonight I'm telling you about a word, not a war, which is a rare thing in this valley. The word was smitten. Old Tamsin Reed carried it on her wrist for forty winters, though nobody living could tell you now what it meant, only that it had once been a feeling, and the feeling had been a sickness and a sweetness both.

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It came to her from the drowned library at Hollin Point, where the sea had taken the top floors. She went down in a tarred diving bell with a fishing line for a lifeline and came up with a single brown book whose pages had stuck together like bread. Inside, in a hand so thin it looked like smoke, someone had written to a man named Edwin Carrow. Most of the letter had gone to salt. The last line survived: I am smitten, and the rest of me is only weather.

Tamsin read it to the ferrymen every evening, and they argued every evening. Dog Harrow said smitten meant struck, like a bell or a coin. Mabel said it meant bitten by a fish. Nobody wanted to say the plain thing, that it was the sound a heart makes when it stops pretending. Then came the spring when Tamsin's own daughter stood on the jetty with a rope in her hands, laughing at nothing, and Tamsin finally said the word aloud to her.

The girl asked what it meant. Tamsin dipped a pin in soot ink and wrote it down her forearm, thin as a fishing line, so she would never have to ask again. Then she tipped her head at the water. Go on, she said. The boat's waiting, and you have the weather.