Sheet of eight hand-drawn decorative letter M designs in black outline lettering, with swirls, flourishes and gothic-style serifs, for tattoo lettering.

Decorative letter M lettering flash sheet

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A sheet of eight hand-drawn capital and lowercase letter M designs in black ink outline on white paper. The letterforms range from gothic and blackletter-inspired shapes to looping script, with curls, swash tails and ornamental serifs. The image is a line drawing only, with no shading or colour, and the designs are spaced in a neat grid.

Lettering Lettering Monogram Flourish Script Swirl Flash sheet

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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

Sit nearer the fire, and mind the cat, she doesn't like being stepped over. You want the M story? Everyone in Hollin Dene wants the M story, though no two of us tell it the same. My grandmother swore it was the black gothic letter, all spikes and a heart like cold stone, and she'd press her thumb into the table as if the shape might climb out of the grain.

Keep reading

There was a sign-painter called Edwin Marrow who came up from the market town each spring with a box of brushes and a tin of lamp black. He painted the church gate, the inn sign, the wheel at the mill. Then, one wet April, he went into the beech wood where the path splits three ways, and he cut an M into the first grey trunk he met. Not a plain one. He drew it tall and sharp at the shoulders, then looped its stem and gave it a swash tail that curled back on itself like a bracken frond unrolling. The next morning the children were copying it in the mud with sticks, and the baker's boy could write his own name in a loop so long it reached the ford.

Edwin carved one more, on the stile post, and then he stopped. Nobody saw him leave. His paints dried in their tins and his box sat on the bench outside the inn for a year, until the rain softened the lid. Some say he finished that last M in a hand nobody could read. Some say its tail is still growing, a hair's breadth a winter, and that is why the path never quite reaches the village boundary.

So when you walk through the wood tomorrow, don't go whistling. Keep your eyes on the bark. If you see a curl that wasn't there last spring, you'll know which letter is still looking for its word. Mind that root, that's a serif, and it isn't finished with you.