Black line drawing of an upper and lower case script alphabet and numerals 0 to 9 in flowing copperplate-style lettering, shown as a reference sheet.

Copperplate script alphabet and numerals sheet

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

The sheet shows uppercase letters A to Z, lowercase letters a to z and the digits 1 to 9 and 0 in an ornate, flowing script. The linework is fine and continuous, with loops, swashes and varied stroke weight. The drawing is black on a white background with no colour and a plain, evenly spaced layout.

Lettering Alphabet Script Letter Numeral

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

You find the copybook wedged under the leg of the hall piano at Marram House, three weeks after the last summer lodger has gone. Its pages are soft as cloth from the damp off the sea, and someone has copied the whole alphabet onto every line in brown ink: capitals first, then the small letters leaning forward as if they were in a hurry, then the numerals, ending in a neat round nought.

Keep reading

Each evening you sit at the kitchen table once the bread is set for the morning and copy one row, the way the note tucked into the spine instructs. The loop of the capital L must be left open, the descender of the g must not touch the line beneath, and the swashes on the Q run out like a wave that has changed its mind. Your wrist aches. Outside, gulls quarrel over the bins, and the light on Scarrow Point sweeps across the window every eleven seconds.

On the ninth night a folded slip falls out when you lift the cover. It is addressed in the same looping hand to a Mr Owen Pell, care of the harbour office, and inside is a list of rooms and prices, with one line at the bottom: tell him the nought is for the ones who stayed. You don't know who Pell was, or who never came back for him. The harbour office has been a bakery since before you were born.

You take up the pen, write your own name at the foot of the page, and then add a nought beside it, closed and round. For once it doesn't look like the end of anything.