Two stacked photos of black and grey blackletter lettering tattooed on skin, with grey shading fading through the strokes.

Blackletter lettering shown in two panels

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

The image shows two stacked close-up photographs of a blackletter word tattooed on skin. The letters have solid black outlines with soft grey gradient shading running through the strokes, and the flourished serifs and spurs are clearly defined. The ink is entirely black and grey, and the letters fill the frame edge to edge in each panel.

Lettering Other Blackletter Letter Word Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer to the fire, the coals are only good for the one of us. You want the tale of the two Greaves brothers at Hollin Bridge? Then mind the tea and don't interrupt me. The customs house there had one door and two keys, both cut by the same smith, and the smith was a saint on Sundays and a sinner the rest of the week, so folk said the keys were honest either way.

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The brothers ran salt over that bridge after dark. The elder was called Saint by the village for his church voice and his clean collar. The younger was Sinner for the way he lied to his mother before breakfast. Each swore the other was the true one. When the excise man came asking questions, Saint stood in the lamplight and said nothing at all, and Sinner stood in the dark and said everything he could think of, and between the two of them the salt went through every week for six years.

Then the bridge flooded in March. Saint went under the first wave trying to hold a rope taut, and the water took him past the posts. Sinner stood on the far bank with the last cart and the keys buttoned in his coat. He could have driven on. Instead he walked back into the black water and found his brother's hand by the iron ring on its finger, the only thing either of them had ever given the other for nothing.

The excise man wrote in his book that one cart was saved and two men were lost. Go to the customs house and they'll show you the nail on the wall where both keys hang. The one that opens nothing is worn bright from thumbs, and nobody will tell you why. Mind the step going out, it's been loose since the flood.