Black ink handwritten script reading choose joy on a pale grey background, drawn as a lettering design for a tattoo with no body placement shown.

Choose joy handwritten lettering design

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

The image shows the words choose joy written in flowing, hand-lettered black script on a soft grey gradient background. The letters have thick and thin strokes, with long looping tails on the j and y that extend below the baseline and a small dot above the j. The design is monochrome and centred, with no skin or body visible.

Lettering Text Script

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The windfalls have started to split on the grass by the wall, and your grandfather's ladder still leans against the old Bramley with its rungs gone grey. You have been sent up it with a pot of chalk and a list nobody else wanted to write. Every tree in Hollins Orchard gets a number, and every number gets a word, because the buyers from Leeds like their apples named like the weather.

Keep reading

Dora from the packing shed reads the list over your shoulder and snorts at the word you have chosen for the tall Discovery in the bottom corner. "Choose joy? Nobody buys joy in October." You tell her the tree has earned it. It carried the frost that killed half the blossom and still kept eleven fruit on one bough. You wrote the letters large, with the j swinging its loop down past the trunk so the chalk would catch the light.

By four o'clock the wasps are drunk in the windfalls and the light goes long and gold across the rows. Dora's boy comes running with a crate of cider jugs and a dog nobody owns. You climb down slowly and stand at the foot of the tree to look up at what you have written. The dot above the j has already been knocked by a hand reaching for fruit and smudged into a little comet.

Next spring the ladder will be moved and the rain will wash the chalk away, and the word will live only in the memories of two people and a tree. You leave it anyway, the looping letters still legible on the bark, and go in for tea.