Black and white blackletter alphabet sheet showing upper and lower case letters A to Z in an ornate lettering style.

Blackletter alphabet lettering sheet

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

The image is a drawn alphabet sheet with upper and lower case letters from A to Z arranged in rows on a white background. The letters use a blackletter style with heavy black strokes, pointed serifs and decorative flourishes. The design is rendered in black ink with grey shading and no colour.

Lettering Alphabet Blackletter Letter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The punch for the capital A had split twice in the cold, and Tobiah Ferrar was filing its spur by a single tallow candle when the widow came down the stairs without her shawl. "Master wanted the whole sheet done by Lady Day," she said, as if he had not heard it forty times. He had. The shop smelt of lamp oil and lead, and the copper matrices lay in rows on the bench like teeth in a jaw.

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Blackletter, the master had always said, was not written so much as hammered: every stroke wants a blade on its shoulder, every serif a point that could draw blood. Tobiah cut the B with its bowl pinched shut, the D with a crown of hairline spurs, the F so its tail crossed the foot of the next letter. He had learned the trick from a Flemish journeyman who swore a reader's eye stops at the first hard edge it meets, so the pointed corners were there to hold it.

On the third night the widow sat on the cutting stool and read the alphabet aloud, letter by letter, the way she read her husband's accounts. At each capital she named a word that began with it. Apple. Bell. Cart. When she reached Q she laughed and said there were no good words for Q, and Tobiah cut the Q with its tail swept under the bowl like a bridle. She said that was a good word after all.

The Z was last. He gave it a flourish that ran back along the baseline until it nearly touched the A, the way the master's own signature ran into his mark. "There," the widow said, pressing a thumb to the wet ink. "Now it can start again." Tobiah put out the candle and left the sheet to dry, the first letter and the last one leaning together in the dark.