Fine line black ink lettering spelling the word WITCH on the forearm, with stylised, looping letterforms.

WITCH lettering on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows the word WITCH tattooed in thin black ink on the inner side of an arm, shown close up against plain skin. The letters have a slender, script-like form with some curved strokes and a decorative flourish on the final letters. The image is in black and grey tones with a plain, lightly blurred background.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Witch 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

The lock-keeper at Denby Cut has never once looked you in the eye. He passes the windlass across the gate as though it might bite him, and mutters it to the water rather than to you: "Mind yourself, witch." You have heard worse from better people. You let the word run off the wet balance beam like rain and keep the boat steady in the chamber while the gates grind shut behind you.

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Your grandmother painted the name on the cabin side the summer she bought the Sparrow, in curling letters she said were older than any sign-writer's trade. Everyone along the cut read them differently. The vicar's wife crossed the lane when the boat was moored at Lapwing Bend. Children dared each other to knock on the hull after dark and run. Your grandmother only laughed, dipped her brush in the tin of tar, and told you a name is just a shape people agree to be frightened of.

Last October the river came up over the towpath and carried off two gates and a sheep. Afterwards the lock-keeper's girl, Nell, appeared at your stern with a soaked notebook and asked how to spell the word the way your grandmother wrote it. You showed her with a finger in the wet grain of the tiller, the W looping back on itself, the H drawn like a bird's wing. Nell copied it carefully, tongue between her teeth.

Her father watched from the lock house window and said nothing. When the flood water dropped, a small board appeared on the lock gate, painted in the same looping hand: WITCH, and beneath it, in plainer letters, Mind yourself. You never learned who had taught him the shape, only that the cut grew quieter after that, and the boats came through without anyone crossing the lane.