White blackletter capital letters A to Z with decorative swirls and flourishes on a black background, shown as a lettering flash sheet.

Blackletter alphabet flash sheet

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A full alphabet of capital letters from A to Z, drawn in an ornate blackletter style in white on a solid black background. Each letter has sharp, angular strokes with curling scrolls and spirals at the ends, and the letters are arranged in rows of about eight. The high contrast and even spacing make the sheet clear to read as a design reference.

Lettering Alphabet Letter Blackletter Flourish Swirl Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sign-painter had been asked to letter the banns board by Saturday, and by Thursday he had only reached the letter M. Tobiah Cole sat at his bench in the back of the Loxley Dean forge with a nib he had cut four times and a sheet of black paper pinned flat under the lamp. His neighbour Ada Pell came in to collect a kettle and stopped to watch him. "You make every capital like it's going to bite," she said. "Give them a bit of curl at the foot, or they'll wander off the board."

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Everyone in the Dean knew the custom. Each capital on a wedding board had a scroll at the end of its strokes, so the letters could hold one another and the names would not drift apart once the couple had spoken their vows. Tobiah had never believed a word of it. He liked his letters sharp and angular, cut clean as hedge-shears, and he said so.

On the morning of the wedding he hung the board above the church door and went home to sleep. When the bells rang he came back and found Nell Harrow and Will Ashby standing beneath it, not looking up at the names but at each other. He looked too, and saw that the scroll on the H of Harrow had curled out across the gap and hooked itself round the first stroke of the A in Ashby. Neither the scroll nor the stroke had been drawn that way. The ink was dry and the hook was fast.

Ada, passing with her kettle, gave him a long look. "Told you," she said, and went on up the lane.