Letters from Oma

Daan brought in a letter his grandmother sent him from Utrecht in 1998. Soft blue ballpoint on airmail paper, folded so many times the creases had gone soft and fuzzy. He wanted six words from the last line, exactly as she wrote them, on his inner forearm. Nothing added. No dates, no flowers, no frame around it. Just her words.

Handwriting tattoos go wrong in a really specific way, and it's almost always the same reason: people trace the scan. Ballpoint on thin paper makes strokes that are, in places, a tenth of a millimetre wide, plus a bit of feathering where the ink soaked into the fibres. Skin simply cannot hold that. Tattoo those hairlines faithfully and within a couple of years half the letters have dropped out and the other half have spread, so you end up with something that's neither her handwriting nor a clean tattoo. The other issue was scale. At the size he wanted, two of her letters had loops that closed to under a millimetre, and closed loops fill in solid over time.

I scanned the letter at 1200dpi and then redrew all six words by hand over the top of it on my tablet. Not tracing, redrawing, which lets you keep the character of a stroke while quietly controlling its weight. Every line came up to a minimum weight that skin can actually hold, the two tight loops got opened up by about fifteen percent, and I kept every wobble and every uneven baseline, because those are the bits that make it hers. Then I printed it at three sizes and had Daan look at all three from across the room. He picked the biggest, which was absolutely the right call. Tattooed in one two hour sitting with a 3RL, single pass on every stroke.