A tattooist in blue gloves uses a tattoo machine on a person's upper arm, which has blue marks and faint black script above the work.

Tattooist working on an upper arm

Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A tattooist wearing blue nitrile gloves works with a tattoo machine on a person's upper arm, which is covered by a purple sleeve. Blue marks, likely ink or stencil lines, are visible on the skin beside faint black cursive script. The photo is taken close up with a shallow depth of field, and the background is a plain beige wall.

Upper arm Tattoo machine Glove Script Cursive

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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

Dear Walter, you will say I have been foolish, and I have, but the stencil was done in Mother's hand. The tattooist, a patient man in blue gloves with a machine that hums like a distant sewing room, traced each loop from the back of her last Christmas card. He lifted the paper with his thumb and laid it flat on my arm the way you would smooth a bedsheet. I kept my eyes on the ceiling tiles and counted them.

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It was the third line that made me stop him. The card says the lamps at Spurn were lit early that winter, and that she hoped we would both be home before the frost. I asked him to go back over the word home, because her pen had skipped and the h looked like a hook. He didn't argue. He wiped the skin with a cloth, dipped the needle, and went over it again, slowly, as if the letter had asked him to.

Afterwards I bought a tea in the shop on Whitefriargate and sat by the window with my sleeve pushed up, watching the skin go red and then settle. The black script sat neatly under the surface, reading backwards from my side of the glass. I thought of you on the pier with your coat buttoned wrong, and I thought you would be cross for a minute and then want to see it.

So come up on the train and look. The h is still a hook. I have decided I like it that way, because it means she was never quite still on the page, and neither are we. Your sister, Nell.