Fine white ink script reading Strength with Roman numerals beneath it, on the wrist and forearm.

Strength script with Roman numerals on a wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a wrist and lower forearm, with a hand partly visible at the top of the frame. The tattoo is a single line of cursive script reading Strength, with a row of Roman numerals underneath it. The ink is white or very pale, so it shows as a raised, light outline against the skin, and the lines are thin and even. The background is a window with a green outdoor view, and the lighting is natural and soft.

Lettering Forearm Strength Roman numeral Script Wrist

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

Ada had the ladder tilted against the chapel wall before the wind had properly dropped, her father's brushes rolled in oilcloth in the back of the van. The job was the lettering over the door of the old Mechanics' Institute in Halifax, its silver leaf worn down to a rumour. The committee wanted Strength across the lintel, with the year beneath it in the old numerals because the first stone had carried them, and nobody alive could tell her whether the crosses were meant to be tens or simply crosses.

Keep reading

She had not expected to mind the copying. Her father had taught her that a letter is a shape before it is a word, and that a script is only honest when the hairlines are thin enough to vanish in daylight. She traced the capital S twice on card, pricked the outline with a pounce wheel, and dusted the chalk through. Below, the caretaker, Mr Okonedo, held the ladder with both hands and told her the building had seen three fires and one flood and had never once fallen down.

When she reached the numerals she stopped and came down for her tea. The figures were the easy part, a few strokes and a pair of crosses, but her hand had started to shake the way it did when she was tired, and she would not have the year wobble above a door. She set the brush down, rolled her sleeves, and wrote the first X on a scrap of board until it sat true. Then she went back up.

By four o'clock the leaf had caught the low sun and the whole lintel read like a clean sentence. Mr Okonedo came out and stood in the road with his hands in his pockets, squinting up at it. "Could read that from the bus," he said. Ada packed the brushes. The paint would hold for thirty years if nobody scrubbed it, and she would not be here to see whether it did.