Black script lettering reading Enough on a area of skin, with fine linework and a soft, slightly blurred background.

Enough in black script lettering

Lettering · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of the single word Enough written in a flowing black script across skin. The linework is fairly thin and even, with the tall E and the descending g and h giving the lettering a handwritten feel. The ink is solid black on a warm, softly lit background with no other colour in the frame.

Lettering Fine line Script Word Lettering

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

Dear Tom,

Keep reading

You'll have heard by now that Harold Penhale finally sold the Mary Jane, and I am sorry you missed her last week. He came to the shed on Tuesday with a tin of gloss and a face like a shut door, and asked me to put a single word across her transom. I asked him which name he wanted. He said none. Just the one word, in the old script your grandad used, and nothing else.

I laid it out in pencil first, the way I was taught. The tall E leaning back like a man hauling on a rope, the n and o knocked together small, then the h and the g falling below the line as if they had somewhere else to be. Harold stood at my elbow the whole afternoon and never once spoke, which for Harold is a speech. When I finished he read it twice with his lips moving, and then he laughed, properly, the first time I'd heard it in years.

Don't go thinking it was a joke at the boat's expense. He told me his wife painted that same word on the kitchen wall in 1974, the winter the money ran out, and he never had the nerve to ask what she meant by it. He just wanted it where it would be seen every morning from the harbour wall, by the gulls and whoever was daft enough to be up before the tide.

I used the thin brush for the hairlines and held my breath on the descenders. Pick up the brush at the g, Tom, and let the stroke finish itself. When I went to tidy up I found I'd never wiped my hands, and the black was smeared on my cuff, which is where it stayed all week. Come home at Easter and I'll show you the cuff.

Love, Auntie Ruth