Close-up of a fine line white ink script tattoo reading Love on the inner forearm near the wrist.

White ink script word Love on a wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A close-up photograph of a white ink tattoo reading the word Love in a flowing, looped script. The thin, even linework stands out pale against the skin, with a little natural sheen on the surface. The word fills the centre of the frame, with a blurred orange and green background at the edges.

Lettering Fine line Forearm Love Script Word White ink

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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 ink comes from a jar of crushed oyster shell that the cook swore was mixing chalk, and you grind it again each night on the galley table while the lamp swings above you. Nothing else aboard will show on the pale paper your sister packed with the parcel from Bristol, so you work carefully, like someone who has been told the thing cannot be done.

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Ninety-one days out, the sea has turned the colour of pewter and the men have stopped singing. Mr Abney the purser reads every letter that leaves the ship, holding each one to the porthole for pencilled codes. He never thinks to look for what he cannot see. You write your letter in plain ink, full of the weather and the price of salt pork, then turn the sheet over and trace a single word across the back in white, loops and all, the way your father taught you to sign your name.

The word takes most of an hour. Your hand shakes on the long downstroke, and twice the nib clogs and you scrape it clean with a fingernail. When it dries it vanishes entirely, a ghost on the paper that only shows in the right light.

Three weeks later a letter comes back from Bristol in your sister's hand. She has held it up to a candle, as you told her to, and she writes that the word rose out of the page like frost on a window. She has pinned the sheet above her bed. Beneath it she has written the same word again in ordinary ink, so you will know she saw it too.