Black and grey blackletter lettering and a winged design across the chest and stomach of a hooded person, with tattooed arms.

Blackletter chest and arm tattoos

Lettering · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A full-length photograph of a shirtless person with the face covered by a black hood, standing on a concrete ledge against a pale sky. The chest and stomach carry black and grey blackletter lettering, a winged design and further linework, and the arms are covered in tattoos. The low camera angle places the figure against an empty sky and a building with graffiti behind.

Lettering Chest Forearm Upper arm Blackletter Script Wing Chest piece Sleeve

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

The chandlery sign had outlasted three gales and a feud between two fishmongers, but the gold had gone off the B in BRANNOCK, so Mrs Feeney sent for me the Tuesday before the regatta. I climbed the ladder with a tin of size and a sable brush worn down to a whisker, and began lifting the old blackletter out of the grain letter by letter, the way my father taught me before the sea took him off the Skerries.

Keep reading

Blackletter is an unforgiving hand. Every stroke is a little fence, every serif a spur, and you cannot hurry it or the letters come out looking like they were written by a drunk. Down on the quay the lifeboat lads sat on the bollards eating chips and asking whether the wings above the door were mine. They were not. My father painted them the spring I was born, two black wings spread over the lintel like a shelter, and the years had faded them to the colour of weak tea.

On the Wednesday I reached the last line and found, under the flaking paint, a scratch in the render that was not a letter at all. Two initials and a small anchor, cut with a nail by someone who was waiting for a boat. Mrs Feeney came up the ladder with a cup of tea and looked at it for a long time.

"Leave it," she said. "Gold on top, and the anchor underneath."

So I laid the gold over the B and the rest of the name, and left the scratch alone where the old paint had kept it. When the sun came round the harbour wall, the whole sign caught fire, and the wings looked for a moment as if they had only just landed.