A woman kneeling and holding a camera to her face, with the word love in dark lettering tattooed on her upper arm.

Word love on upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman kneels on a wooden floor in an off-shoulder sweater and underwear, holding a camera up to her face so her face is hidden. The word love is inked in dark, solid lettering on her upper arm, with the letters in a simple, plain typeface. The image has a warm, vintage-toned colour grade, with the tattoo appearing in black ink against the skin.

Lettering Upper arm Love Word Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last word I ever painted for Dell Haskins was LOVE, and he paid me in cash and a warning. Two hundred miles of nothing either side of Route 93, and the only thing standing up out of the sand was his motel sign, rusted to the colour of old pennies with half its letters gone. He wanted it redone in plain capitals, no curls, no hearts. Anybody driving past at seventy should be able to read it without slowing down, he said, and that was the whole of the job.

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I worked off a sheet of tin propped on two sawhorses, mixing white enamel with a spoon because the can had gone to lumps. The heat came up off the road in sheets. Every stroke had to dry before the next or the edges smeared. My mother taught me to letter when I was nine, on the backs of cereal boxes, and she used to say a plain word is harder to get right than a fancy one, because there is nowhere to hide a mistake.

On the third afternoon a photographer pulled in and asked if she could take a picture of the sign. She said she was documenting the word, not the motel. I asked her why a word needed documenting. She said people had stopped meaning it, and she wanted proof it had once been written out in the open where a stranger could see it. I didn't know what to say to that, so I finished the O.

When I climbed down the sun had gone orange and the paint was still wet and shining. Dell stood at the edge of the forecourt with his hands in his pockets and read it twice, moving his lips. Then he said it was the first thing to go up on that road in thirty years that didn't need an electric light to make sense of it. I drove off with the tin rattling in the back of the truck all the way to the county line.