Black and grey photo of the words What if... in serif lettering tattooed on a forearm, with piano keys in the background.

What if... lettering on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of a forearm and wrist with the words "What if..." tattooed in a serif lettering style in black ink. The text sits across the wrist area and is set in a slightly slanted, even hand. The background shows piano keys, and the monochrome treatment gives the image a soft, high-contrast look.

Lettering Forearm 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

At the reunion in the old assembly hall, Dennis Pryce still sits at the upright piano beneath the honours boards, playing the same four bars he played in 1994. You stand by the squash-cup table with a warm glass of white wine and listen, because nobody else is. The hall smells of floor polish and sausage rolls, and someone's name badge has come unstuck from a lapel.

Keep reading

Mrs Ansell finds you there. She once told you a fugue was an argument nobody wins, and she still stands as if she is waiting for a wrong note. She asks what you did with the scholarship. You tell her about the orchestra that folded, the session work, the flat in Leeds with a piano that stuck on B flat. She nods at the keys. 'You never finished that waltz, did you? The one with the question at the end.'

You had written it at sixteen, a tune that climbed and climbed and then hung on a chord with no resolution. Across the top of the manuscript you had pencilled the title, What if, then crossed it out, because it sounded like something from a child's exercise book. Now the question seems less like a flaw. You cross the parquet to the piano, and Dennis shifts along the bench without looking up.

You play the last bar and leave the chord hanging. The hall goes quiet in the way a room does when it has been waiting for something it did not know it wanted. Nobody claps. Mrs Ansell says, 'There,' and that is the whole review. You walk out into the car park with the question still ringing in your ears, and for once it does not sound like regret.