Black ink lettering tattoos on a forearm, including the words KEEP and GRL PWR and an arrow, with a woman wearing a white sun print t-shirt.

Word tattoos on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman in a white t-shirt with a yellow sun and mandala print has several black ink tattoos on her forearm. The tattoos are small word designs, reading KEEP, GRL PWR and a partly visible word beginning Carpe, with a small arrow, and the linework appears simple and bold. The image is a close crop of the torso and arms against a dark background, with the tattoos and shirt print as the main focus.

Lettering Forearm Arrow Word Sun Mandala T-shirt

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The function room above the bowling alley still smells of chip fat and floor polish, and Dawn Ashby is waving a yearbook at you before you've got your coat off. "Page forty-one," she says. "Somebody wrote in yours, and it wasn't me." Under your Year Eleven photo, in purple gel pen gone faintly brown, is Marnie Cole's slanting hand: Carpe the diem, Lewis. Then a little arrow, pointing at nothing, and underneath it, KEEP the good bits, GRL PWR.

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You laugh, because you were fifteen and certain that Marnie Cole knew everything. She had a mandala doodle on every exercise book and a dad who drove a van with a sun painted on the door. You remember her sitting on the wall by the science block, telling you that a life is just a list of things you decided to hold onto. You had not thought about that list in twenty years, and you had kept almost none of it.

Dawn keeps talking about mortgages and a man called Gaz who runs a hot tub business. You are only half listening. Then she presses a creased envelope into your hand. "Marnie left it with me at the start of the year," she says. "She said you'd know which bit to keep."

Inside is a single sheet, a sun drawn in fine black lines, a moon tucked behind it. The arrow points at the word KEEP, and it is pointing, you realise, straight at you.