Black lettering design of the word bastarda in a pointed calligraphic script on a white background, with no body part shown.

Bastarda lettering design

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

The image shows the word bastarda written in a pointed, calligraphic blackletter-style script in solid black ink on a plain white background. The letters have sharp, angular strokes, varied thick and thin weight, and pointed terminals, with the ascenders of the b and d rising above the rest of the word. The composition is a single horizontal line of text, centred and cropped tightly with generous white space around it.

Lettering Script Calligraphy Word

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

The ink had frozen in the nib again, so Hennet breathed on it and cursed the window, where sleet came sideways off the Scheldt and found every gap in the shutters. Brother Joris leaned over his shoulder and sniffed. "You are writing bastarda," he said, as if he had caught a boy stealing candles. "The Abbot wants textura for the charter. Square, heavy, proper."

Keep reading

Hennet had heard the word all his life. The clerks in Ghent called the hand a bastard because it was born of two parents who never agreed: the black blocks of the monks and the quick running hand of the lawyers, who had no time to lift their pens. Nobody had asked the letters whose they were. He dipped again and let the b climb, then the d, both reaching for the rafters the way the masts of the Bruges cogs did when they came in past the sluice at dusk.

The charter was for a widow's strip of marsh that had three claimants, two of them dead. Hennet wrote the name of the marsh in the pointed hand, each stroke cut sharp and then thinned as the pen lifted away, and he thought of the clerks who would read it on a table in the cold, quickly, with fingers that did not want to stop.

Joris read the page twice and did not argue. He only said that textura would sit still on the vellum for a thousand years, and the other thing would run off it like rain, and that the widow had already waited nine winters. Then he took the sand box and shook it over the wet ink, slowly, the way one settles a boat.