Blackletter alphabet flash sheet

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A sheet of ornate blackletter capitals, A to Z, arranged in rows inside a black chain-link border. The letters have heavy black strokes, decorative serifs and pointed flourishes, with some letters carrying small hooks and curls. The ink is entirely black on a pale background with faint grey printed marks behind the letters.

Lettering Alphabet Blackletter Letter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Hollis kept the flash sheet pinned above the bench long after the ink had yellowed, and I copied it every morning before the shop door opened. The capitals were hard to get right. The D always wanted to close up like a fist, and the Q put its tail in the wrong place unless you held your breath. He told me blackletter was meant to look as if it had been written by a man who had never once been in a hurry.

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The commission came up the valley road in March, on a carrier's cart with a sack of wet lime on the seat beside the driver. The chapel at Nant-y-Bwlch wanted its name repainted over the lintel, and the elders were clear that nothing modern would do. I was nineteen and had only ever painted shop fronts. Hollis sent me up with the sheet folded inside my coat and a tin of black enamel that smelt of pine tar.

The road over the pass was steep, and at the top an old iron chain that once held back the rockfall had rusted into a single grey line. I spent two days on the scaffold, working letter by letter. On the second afternoon rain came sideways and I nearly gave up on the flourish of the R. Then the wind dropped, the sun broke through onto the wet board, and the strokes went down clean, as if the sheet had been copied from the hill itself.

When I came down, the elders paid me in coins and a loaf. Hollis asked whether the letters were straight. I told him they were, mostly, and that the Q had come out the way he liked it, its tail curled back under like a dog settling. He pinned my copy beside his own and said that was the only test that mattered.