Black script lettering reading belle âme with small dots either side, above a smaller line reading a beautiful soul, on a plain white background.

Belle âme script lettering design

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A black script lettering design reading "belle âme" with a small dot on each side, set above a smaller line of script reading "a beautiful soul". The linework is solid and even, with no shading, and the design is drawn on a plain white background. The composition is centred and symmetrical, with generous space around the text.

Lettering Script Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Madame Aubrey had her spectacles on the end of her nose when she read the card back to me, and she tapped the word twice with a fingernail the colour of plums. "Âme," she said. "Not ame. The little hat matters. Without it you have said nothing but a name for the sea."

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I was nineteen and had been hired to letter the place cards for my aunt's wedding in Hastings, which meant forty small cards for forty people I did not know, and one large card for the bride, which she wanted to look like something from a shop window in Paris. I had practised for a week in the back bedroom with a fountain pen that leaked. My loops kept collapsing into each other like sleepy swans.

Madame Aubrey had taught French in the sixth form and had agreed to check my spelling in exchange for a bottle of sherry. She sat with me at the kitchen table while the kettle ticked and showed me how the downstroke of the b should swell and then thin, and how the e must be closed so it did not look like a teacup. "Belle âme," she said at last, sliding the card back. "A beautiful soul. People say beautiful for faces. Here it is for the inside."

On the day, my aunt cried at the card and then pretended she had got something in her eye. I still have the spare, pinned above my desk. The dots either side were my own idea, two small full stops like the points of a compass, to hold the words steady. Madame Aubrey called them fussy. Every time I look at them I think she was wrong.