Black script tattoo reading Stay Strong on the inner wrist, with stacked silver and pearl bracelets and red roses behind.

Stay Strong script on a wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a wrist bearing the words Stay Strong in flowing black script lettering. The letters have sweeping joins and tails, with bold strokes in places and finer strokes in others. Stacked silver and pearl bracelets sit below the tattoo, and a blurred background of red roses adds colour to the composition.

Lettering Forearm Stay strong Script Rose Bracelet Pearl

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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

Ruth had painted shop fronts in Hebden Bridge for thirty years, and she could tell a bad brush from a bad mood by the first stroke. The commission came on a Tuesday from the hospital's fundraising woman, who wanted the words across the children's ward window. The gold leaf was dear, and all Ruth had left was a tin of black enamel from the bakery job, so she used the black and let the tails run long.

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The lettering wanted a loop where the S met the t, a curl that a careless hand would pull into a knot. Ruth worked it slowly with a squirrel-hair liner and her breath held, while a porter wheeled a trolley past and a small face pressed against the glass to watch from the corridor side. She painted every letter in reverse on the inside of the pane so they would read true from the outside, which meant thinking backwards through the glass, the way her mother had taught her to write for the mill ledgers.

The note came a fortnight later, folded in a hospital envelope and addressed to The Lady With the Black Paint. It said the loop on the S looked like the end of a skipping rope, and that the boy at the window had traced it with his finger every morning until the nurses let him off the bed to see the whole word. It said he had asked whether the letters were written by someone who was strong, and the nurse had said yes.

Ruth read it at the kitchen table with her spectacles pushed up. She looked at her own hands, dry and blue-stained at the knuckles, and then she went out to the shed to mix a finer black for the next job, because the sign on the chemist's needed a flourish too.