Black lettering tattoo reading THIS IS LOVE in bold block capitals, with JOHN 4:10 in smaller text beside it, on a forearm.

THIS IS LOVE lettering on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows the words THIS IS LOVE in large bold block capitals, with the reference JOHN 4:10 set in smaller, rotated text alongside. The letters are solid black with clean, even edges and little visible shading. The words run diagonally across the arm, filling most of the frame against plain pale skin.

Lettering Forearm Text Lettering Bible verse

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada had the mahl stick braced against the windowsill when Mr Garside came up the steps with the board under his arm, and she knew before he unwrapped it that he would want it bigger than the wall could hold. Forty years she had lettered shopfronts in Whitby, pubs, hearses, a pork butcher's twice, and she had never once been asked to say so little in so much space.

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"Three words," he said. "And the reference, small, somewhere it won't shout."

She mixed black enamel on the slab, let it settle, and laid out the capitals in chalk first. THIS went along the top in tall upright strokes. IS she pushed in beside it, narrower, because her father had taught her never to crowd a letter. LOVE came down the right-hand side, the O bulging like a lifebelt. Where the reference should have gone she tilted the chalk and wrote JOHN 4:10 running upwards between the letters, the way a ship's name is painted on a stern when there is no room for it flat.

Garside watched her hand and said nothing for a while. Then he asked whether anyone would ever read the small part. She told him only people who climbed up to look, and that was how most good things were found.

When the paint was dry she carried the board out to the chapel roof herself and fixed it under the eaves, letters facing the sea. Nobody on the road could read the reference. Anyone looking up from the harbour wall would see only the three words, plain as a weathervane.