Arabic calligraphy lettering design

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A bold black Arabic calligraphic script is drawn on a plain white background. The strokes vary in thickness, with a tapered sweeping curve, a thin hooked line ending in a small dot, and a solid diamond shape below. The composition is centred and sparse, with no shading or added colour.

Lettering Arabic script Calligraphy Lettering Letter Diamond

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ink had thickened in the cold again, so you held the pot against your chest while the lamp-men came up from the Caddon shaft, grey to the eyes, and set their helmets on the bench without a word. You had been sent up from the schoolroom to copy names onto the board by the chapel door, but your hand was not steady enough for names. Your uncle Idris always said a wrong letter was a second death, so when Mrs Hale came down from the top cottages with a sixpence in her glove, you did not argue.

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She did not want a name. Her son had gone down on the Tuesday shift and not come up, and he had hung his coat on the same hook in the lamp-room for nine years. She wanted one word painted above that hook, the old word her grandmother used, the one that curls back on itself like a lamp cord. She gave you a pinch of crushed slate to mix into the black, so the mark would hold in the damp. She said he carried a stone in his pocket for luck, and asked if you could put something of it in the picture too.

You drew it in one pull. The long sweep went first, thick at the start and thinning to a hair, then the tail curled round and ended in a dot the size of a pin head. Beneath it you set a small dark diamond, pressed hard with the nib, the way the stone had sat in her son's palm. The lamp-men stood in the yard and watched the ink dry in the wind without saying anything.

When the sun cleared the slag heap, the letters threw a long thin shadow across the cobbles, and the dot caught the light like a drop of water. Mrs Hale stood under it for a long time. Then she asked you to write his name beneath, and you could, because by then your hand had stopped shaking.