Black line drawing of a heart outline containing blackletter-style lettering that reads Family, with a large decorative initial F, shown as a tattoo design with no body placement visible.

Family lettering in a heart outline

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A black outline drawing of a heart with the word Family written across its centre in blackletter style. A large, ornate initial F extends from the upper left of the heart and curls into a loop at its base. The linework is uniform and unshaded, set on a plain white background.

Lettering Heart Family Lettering Initial Blackletter

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

They say the dance hall at Carrick Bay was built on a Tuesday, and that nobody danced on its boards for a year, because the joiners had gone home to their wives and the floor was too clean to spoil. The first to dance there was a widow called Maud Quarry, who had three sons and a fiddle she could not play. Every morning she swept the boards with a broom made from her husband's old hat-band, and every morning she waited.

Keep reading

The stranger came in the wet week of October with a case the length of a child. He asked for one dance and no fee, only that the family who danced with him should stand in a line and give their names. Maud counted her sons, then her sons' wives, then the grandchildren still held in their mothers' arms. He opened the case and drew out a fiddle of bone-pale wood and played a tune nobody in the village knew, yet every one of them found their feet moving before they had decided to move.

The tune went on until the lamps guttered. Each time a name was called, the dancer's shadow stayed behind on the boards, curled at the foot like the tail of a letter, and by the end the shadows had joined hand to hand and gone round the room in a ring. The stranger stopped playing. He told Maud the price was plain: the line would hold so long as no one walked out of the hall in anger. Then he folded his fiddle and went into the rain, and the shadows went with him.

Maud still sweeps the floor. Her youngest keeps the tune in the chapel bell, and when a quarrel starts at the Friday dance, somebody takes the nearest hand and says the names aloud, one after another, until nobody can remember what the quarrel was about.