Blackletter alphabet sheet

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A chart of the full alphabet in upper and lower case, set in a dense, angular blackletter typeface with pointed serifs. The letters are drawn in solid black ink on a plain white background, arranged in six rows. The layout is even and uncoloured, with the lettering forms clearly separated for easy reading.

Lettering Blackletter Alphabet Letter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ruth had pinned the chart above the range in October, when the first frost came and the lambing ledger had to be made legible for the man from the mart. Its letters were black as rooks and angular as broken fence wire, each capital sitting on its pointed serifs like a gate hung wrong. Her father called it heathen writing. Her mother had copied it from a printer's sheet in Leeds the year they married, and nobody on the farm had ever read a word of it except the postman, who refused to deliver anything addressed in it.

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By the second week of January the pipes had frozen twice and the ewes were heavy, and Ruth sat at the scrubbed table with a stub of pencil, working through the alphabet one letter at a time. A for Alder, the lane where the stray cattle got through. B for Brook, which had iced solid. She traced the hooked foot of the R over and over until the paper furred. Outside, the wind dragged snow flat across the yard, and the dog lifted its head whenever the barn door knocked.

On the fourteenth, Tom Ainsley came up the track on foot, his cart abandoned in a drift, asking if anyone had seen the shepherd's boy. Ruth gave him tea and the chart as a way of keeping him from the window. He squinted at it and, to her surprise, read out the field names in the old script, slowly, as if each word were a gate he had to lift.

When he had gone she took the stub of charcoal from the range ledge and copied the names he had read, then wrote her own beneath in the hooked capitals, the R with its foot curled like a shepherd's crook. The charcoal smudged at every point, so she pressed harder, until the black lay thick on the slate and would not come off with a thumb.