Black ink lettering in a stylised non-Latin script on a forearm, photographed against a warm, golden background.

Stylised script lettering on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a forearm with a small block of black ink lettering made of stylised, curved characters with a few dots above. The linework is solid and even, with no shading, and the ink reads as one dark tone. A faint, lighter mark sits at the top right of the frame, and the warm golden fabric in the lower right supplies the background.

Lettering Forearm Script Character Lettering

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

The soot cake was the size of my palm and hard as river stone, and Brother Tenzin said I would not be allowed to touch the brush until I could grind it to a single black tone with no grit in it. I had been at it since the bell before dawn. My wrist ached the way he had promised it would, the lamp oil stank, and each time I thought the ink was smooth he tilted the bowl toward the window and showed me the glint of a missed speck.

Keep reading

Something in him had changed that autumn. He no longer shouted at the boys who dropped their styluses. He sat at the far end of the scriptorium with his back to the shelves and copied the same three syllables over and over on a single slip of paper, dotting each one with the tip of his smallest brush, then folding the slip and feeding it to the brazier before starting again. I asked him once what the words were for. He said they were not for anyone to read. They were for the hand to remember.

On the last morning of the month he let me take the brush. My first stroke wobbled like a dropped thread. He did not correct it. He only leaned across, set one dot above the curl so lightly the ink barely took, and said, "Now it is finished, because it is wrong in exactly the right place."

I did not understand him then. I have copied thousands of characters since, and I still do not know whether he meant the words or the wobble. What I do know is that his last slip was the only page in the monastery that came out of the fire with its edges intact, and that when I held it to the lamp the black had gone the colour of old gold, as if the ink had been waiting all along to be seen.