Three black ink tattoos of the word sorella, in script and block lettering, on two forearms and a wrist.

Sorella word tattoos on forearms and wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Three word tattoos spell sorella, one in looping script on the left forearm, one in a plain sans-serif on the other forearm, and one in thin lettering across the wrist with a vertical line beside it. The linework is fine and even, with no shading, and the ink is solid black on light skin. The photo shows the arms crossed and held together against a green background, with the tattoos as the clear focus.

Lettering Forearm Word Script Lettering 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

Maddy had the loops, Pell had the plain block, and Ruth, the youngest and most stubborn, got the thin hairline that nobody else could hold steady on a moving van's door. Their father had taught them the same word three ways before he died, and he said that was the whole trade: a sign was only as good as the sister who painted it.

Keep reading

They worked from a tin of gold leaf above a chip shop in a salt-bitten seaside town, and the word they painted most was sorella, because a landlady had wanted it over her door for her two daughters, though nobody on the street could say what it meant. Maddy said it meant sister. Pell said it meant sister in Italian, which was the same thing with better vowels. Ruth said nothing and kept ruling guide lines down each board with a steel rule, straight as a tide mark.

The winter the wholesaler failed, the three of them were owed eleven months of rent and one sign. The landlady's door was the last job. Ruth painted the word in the thin hand while her sisters held the ladder, and when she stepped back she drew a single vertical stroke beside it, a bar the width of a finger. Maddy asked what the line was for. Ruth said it was so the next person would know where the word stopped and the rest of the street began.

Nobody paid them. The landlady kept the sign anyway. Years on, the chip shop has a new name and the gold has gone the colour of weak tea, but the three hands still show when the low sun comes across the glass.