Forearm before and after: black text tattoo with spelling errors, then a realistic notebook page tattoo with red corrections over the same words.

Text cover-up on a forearm, notebook paper

Realism · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The top photo shows a black ink tattoo of a short passage of text on a forearm, with two misspelt words. The lower photo shows the reworked tattoo, a realistic torn sheet of lined notebook paper with blue shading, brown stains and red ink corrections drawn over the words. The before image is black and grey, while the after image uses colour for the paper, stains and red annotations.

Realism Lettering Forearm Text Handwriting

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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

The inspector's letter arrived on a Tuesday, folded inside the supply boat's manifest, and it said only that the entry for the night of the eleventh had two words spelt wrong. Margaret Dunphy read it twice at the kitchen table, then climbed the tower stairs for the logbook with her tea going cold beside the teapot.

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The page was still damp at one corner where the storm had come in through the gallery door. Under the ink she could see the tide tables, the oil count, the times she had wound the clockwork. In the margin, in her own careless hand, was the line she had written at three in the morning: Altough the sea was hammering the rock, the lamp held steady and kept the boats off. She had spelt through as thgough too, because her fingers were cold and the glass was rattling in its frame.

She took the red pencil from the drawer where she kept the bulb spares. Corrections were the rule, the inspector had written, and crossings-out had to be legible. So she drew a line under each mistake and an arrow up to the right word, the way Miss Haddow had done with her compositions forty years before, in a schoolroom above a fish market that smelt of brine and coal smoke.

When she finished, the page looked like a child's exercise, red marks dragging across the storm-stained lines. She signed beside them, Margaret Dunphy, keeper, and the date. Out past the rocks a trawler's light blinked twice, as it did every night, and she raised a hand to it before she remembered the crew could not see her from there. She left the lamp burning anyway.