Forearm with a white ink snake tattoo in fine dotted linework, with the word achieve in black lettering above it.

White ink snake and achieve lettering on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A forearm shows a coiled snake drawn in white ink with fine dotted linework and an open, tangled body. Above it, the word achieve is set in small black typewriter-style lettering. The background is a pale grey textured wall, and a small dark mark is partly visible at the lower edge of the frame.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Snake Word

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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

Sit closer, the lamps on Tanner Row are going out one at a time, and the ones still burning I don't trust. I'll tell you about Bernard Sowerby, who mended typewriters above a pawnshop when this city still had trams. Every night at ten he came down, bolted the shutter, and drew on the wet pavement with a stub of white chalk. Never a picture of anything you'd want to meet. A snake, always, looping back through itself, dotted along its spine the way rain dots a windowpane.

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The pawnbroker's girl, Irene, asked him why he never finished the head. He said the head was the part that got you into trouble, and that a thing left unfinished stays out of the rain longer. She laughed at that. She was seventeen and had a cough the whole street could hear coming up the stairs.

In March the chalk ran out, so he took to drawing on his own forearm with a pen dipped in lamp-black. Just the one word across the wrist, in the plain capitals his machines had punched for thirty years. After that he went quiet. Irene found him in the back room with the bench typewriter open, the carriage pushed to the far end and one key still held down under his finger.

The paper in the roller had a single line on it. Achieve, it said, and nothing after. The snake had come loose from the pavement drawings and was lying across the floorboards in a white tangle, dotted and faintly glistening, as though someone had drawn it there in the dark and forgotten to close the loop.