Close-up of a hand with black stiletto nails and black skull rings, over a forearm covered in black blackletter lettering tattoos and an ornamental design.

Blackletter lettering on a forearm beside skull rings

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A hand with black stiletto nails and black skull rings rests in front of a forearm covered in black blackletter script and an ornamental filigree pattern. The lettering is bold, with sharp angular strokes and solid black fill, and the ornament below is finer linework with some shading. The image is almost entirely black and grey, with the skin tone and dark background framing the tattoos and rings.

Lettering Forearm Hand Blackletter Script Filigree Ornament Skull Ring Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pull that bench nearer the hearth, the lot of you, and mind the candle, for it's the last one we've got and the snow isn't finished yet. Up on the Lowmoor pass there was once a scrivener called Tobias Wyke, who kept a room above the Three Crows and copied the names of the dead onto vellum for the parish. He wrote in the black letter his master had taught him, all sharp angles and gate-tooth strokes, and he bordered every page with that fine curling vine you still see on the old church registers. The vicar asked him once why he wasted good ink on ivy. Tobias said the vine kept the dead from wandering off the page.

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He wore two skull rings on his right hand, pewter things cast by a jeweller in the valley, heavy enough that he'd lift his hand like a man carrying a lamp. He said they helped him remember each name he set down, and that a scrivener who forgot a name had better find another trade. So he wrote, and the snow piled, and the registers grew thick as bread.

One February a traveller came up out of the white with frost in his beard and no name on the parish list. Tobias dipped his pen and the ink would not come. The traveller only smiled and said that a man who writes everyone else's name ought to know his own, so Tobias sat down, shaking, and wrote it out in full, border and all.

In the morning the pass was clear, the road was open to the valley, and the rings were lying on the table, cold and empty. The vellum was dry and the ink was black. Nobody in the parish has ever found Tobias Wyke's name on any register since, which is why, my friends, we never sign our own names in this house.