Black and grey blackletter script with a diamond lattice border tattooed along a forearm, against a dark background.

Blackletter text and lattice on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A forearm runs diagonally across the frame with two lines of blackletter script in dark grey ink, decorated with small flourishes. A border of small diamond lattice and dotted shapes runs alongside the lettering, and a clenched hand with dark nail polish sits at the lower right. The shading is crisp and even, and the subject is lit against a plain black background.

Lettering Geometric Forearm Blackletter Script Lettering Lattice Diamond Flourish Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The handbills for the Ballroom on Kingsland Road came off my father's flatbed every Thursday, and he would never set a headline in anything but blackletter. "Nobody trusts a dance hall printed in Roman," he said, tapping the case of hand-cut lead. So I learned to pick out the spiky capitals backwards, one sort at a time, while the rest of the borough was already putting on its good shoes.

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The border was the part I loved. He had a strip of brass diamonds cut by a man in Clerkenwell who went out of business before I was born, and every bill got a lattice down its left edge, dotted with little lozenges where the rules met. When the ink was fresh and the bulb over the press burned low, the lattice looked like a net someone had thrown over the words to keep them from wandering off the page.

The order that changed things came in pencil on the back of a cigarette packet. Two lines, no name, and a single word pressed so hard the card had torn: Saltate. My father read it twice, then set the type himself with his back to me. When I asked what it meant he said it meant dance, and that the Ballroom had paid in advance, which was rare enough to be suspicious. He didn't sleep that night, and neither did I.

On Friday the floor was full, and the lattice we'd printed lay in long diamond shadows across the boards. My father stood by the door reading the crowd the way he read a proof, hunting for the one letter that had gone wrong.