Black line drawing of an A to Z blackletter alphabet sheet, with each capital letter shown in ornate gothic script on a white background.

Blackletter alphabet sheet, A to Z

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A grid of 26 capital letters, A to Z, drawn in blackletter style with pointed strokes, hairline serifs and decorative flourishes. The letters are rendered in clean black outline on a plain white background, with shading only suggested by parallel lines in some strokes. The layout is five letters per row across five rows, with the final letter Z centred on the bottom row.

Lettering Alphabet Blackletter Letter

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Snow had already filled the hollow below the hospice when Brother Anselm pulled the exemplar sheet out from under the psalter and found his hands would not keep still. Master Odo had drawn the alphabet forty years earlier, in the same brown ink that now stained the lectern, and the pointed capitals still looked as sharp as the day they dried. A, B, C in their tidy rows. Anselm had copied them every morning for a month, and every morning the S came out like a hook caught in cloth.

Keep reading

Outside, mule bells came up the pass, thin and far off. The last carrier of the season. Anselm knew he had until those bells reached the gate to finish the initial letters for the Easter gospel, or the abbot would send the book south unlettered and the house would lose the bishop's silver.

He dipped the quill and drew the first stroke of a D, then the second, hairline thin, the way Odo had taught him: lift the pen only when the letter is finished, and let the flourish trail like a lead line over a rockface. At the foot of the sheet, the tail of the Z curled off the edge of the parchment. Odo had never explained that. Anselm had asked once, and the old man had laughed and said the Z always runs off the page because someone is always still walking up the road.

The bells stopped at the gate. Anselm breathed on the nib until the ink ran again. He wrote the last letter of the gospel and let its tail fall over the margin, where the snow could not reach it.