Black and grey script lettering reading You Only Live Once with soft shading behind the letters, tattooed on an upper arm.

You Only Live Once lettering on an upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo reads You Only Live Once in flowing script, with the words stacked over four lines across the skin. The linework is dark and fairly bold, with soft grey shading around the letters that gives a slightly blurred halo. The photo is taken close up on a bare limb against a pale top and dark fabric, so the lettering fills most of the frame.

Lettering Upper arm Quote Text Phrase

Find an artist for this

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

Mr Pargeter taught me to load a brush before he taught me to read a street, and he never let me forget that a sign has to be read at the speed of a bicycle. So when Mrs Ada Lusk came into the workshop on Harbour Row with flour still on her cardigan, I was the one who got to turn her request into letters. She wanted the bakery window repainted, and she wanted it to say something that would stop a fisherman mid-stride.

Keep reading

I chose a flowing hand, the kind Pargeter kept for funerals and regattas, and stacked the words over four lines so the eye had to climb them like rungs. The travelling circus bills had done the same thing for years. Behind each line I ran a wash of grey, thinned with turpentine, so the letters seemed to sit in a soft mist, as if the glass had fogged on the inside. Pargeter stood behind me with his pipe unlit and said nothing for a long time.

'Next time you'll tell me to make it prettier,' he said at last, 'and I'll tell you the lettering is the easy part. The hard part is standing outside in the rain to see whether it still reads.' We stood there together until the drizzle had soaked through my collar and the paint had gone tacky under our breath.

Mrs Lusk paid me in coppers and a warm loaf wrapped in newspaper. The next morning the sun came low across the harbour and struck the gold leaf, throwing light down onto the cobbles. A boy with a kite stopped in front of the window and sounded out the words under his breath, one line at a time, the way I had once, slowly, as if he had all the time in the world.