Black lettering tattoo in a non-Latin script running vertically down the forearm.

Vertical non-Latin script on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Three vertical lines of black non-Latin script sit along the forearm of a light-skinned arm. The strokes are solid and bold with tapered ends and small dots, set against plain skin with no shading. The photo was taken indoors against a tiled floor and a wooden cabinet, with the arm filling the centre of the frame.

Lettering Forearm Script Lettering Text

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 letters ran down the inside of the main mast of the Brindle Gull, three upright lines cut deep before she ever left Saltmere, and old Tomas the carpenter would not say what they spelled. Sailors asked him in every port. He only said that a name was a thing you did not read aloud on open water, and he went back to his plane.

Keep reading

Marit, his youngest, could read them. She had learned her letters from a psalter her grandmother kept in a biscuit tin, and she spent the first three weeks of the crossing lying flat on the foredeck with a candle stub, trying the sounds against the wind. On the thirty-first night she copied the top line onto a scrap of sailcloth, then onto the back of her hand with cook's soot mixed in lamp oil, so she would not lose it when the spray came over.

The storm came the next morning out of the north-west, the kind that tears a rudder clean off its pins. The captain ordered the sail stripped and the crew to the pumps. Marit went aft to the mast, pressed her inked hand flat against the carved wood, and read the three lines in a steady voice, the way her grandmother read the dead their names. The wind did not stop. But it turned, and the cloud split like a loaf, and under it lay a green shore that nobody on the chart had marked.