Tattoo design of two bold black Chinese characters above the words Best Friend in script, set on a tan kraft-paper background.

Chinese characters and Best Friend lettering

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

Two large black Chinese characters are written in a brush-style hand, with the words Best Friend in a smaller handwritten script beneath them. The strokes are solid black with no shading, and the design sits on a plain tan, textured paper background. The composition is centred and simple, with the characters dominating the upper area and the English text placed below.

Lettering Chinese character Script Calligraphy

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tell me what the first stroke is for, Mei Lin said, and I told her it was for the hand, the part that holds on, and she laughed because I had recited it like a schoolboy. It was past eleven. The shutter of her father's print shop was half down, rain was bouncing off the tram rails outside, and on the bench between us lay a sheet of tan paper the colour of old cardboard, with nothing on it but a faint pencil grid.

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The left half of the first character is the hand. The right half is the word for arriving. Put together they mean someone you have arrived at, a person who does not make you wait at the door. The customer had come in that afternoon with a birthday card, holding it open at the English words, and asked for those in brush beneath the Chinese. He wanted it to look as if an old uncle had written it. Mei Lin said that was the only kind of request she liked, because nobody could check it.

She wrote the right-hand character without looking down, two strokes that cross like two people walking the same street. Then she dipped the brush again and let the ink pool at the end of the last dot. It ran. A small black bloom spread into the tan fibres, and I reached for a cloth, but she caught my wrist.

Leave it, she said. A friend is allowed one mistake, and that one is mine to keep. She pressed her thumb into the red paste and stamped it in the corner, where the two characters met the English, and then she turned off the lamp and let the rain do the rest of the talking.