Red and black blackletter capital letter with three black birds in flight, tattooed on a lower leg in a lettering style.

Blackletter initial with birds on a calf

Lettering · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A large blackletter capital letter sits on the lower leg, with a bold black outline and a red top that shades into black toward the base. Several black bird silhouettes, including one that overlaps the letter's upper edge, fly around it against the pale skin. The image is a close, straight-on photo with the tattoo filling most of the frame.

Lettering Calf Letter Blackletter Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm had been told the capital was to be a D, for the abbey's name, and he had mixed the red for it from madder root the night before. He worked by a single candle in the scriptorium at Hollin Vale, where the wind came under the door and lifted the parchment like a sleeper's sheet. The letter was as tall as his forearm. He drew the broken strokes of the old black hand, the spurs and feet and pointed shoulders, and filled the upper bowl with red while the wet was still in it.

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The trouble began at the lower bowl. Anselm had meant to shade the red down into black, the way Brother Edric had shown him on the Gospels, so the letter looked like it was rising out of a fire. But his hand was shaking, the black ran too early, and by the time he had steadied himself the colour had settled where it liked. Then there were the crows. He had not drawn them. They were on the sill when he looked up, a dozen of them, clicking at the shutter, and when the bell for lauds rang they went up all at once and crossed the page. Where their shadows fell on the wet ink they left small black marks that would not come off.

Prior Oswin found him there at dawn. He studied the initial for a long time and said that a bird on a page was a vanity, and that the abbey had no use for vanity. Anselm said nothing. He was watching the last crow circle the bell tower and settle on the cross, and he thought that a letter could be a door as well as a word, and that whatever it opened was not his to close.