Flash sheet of flourished script numerals from 1 to 20 in black linework, with looping tails, shown as tattoo design options.

Flourished script numerals 1 to 20

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A flash sheet of 20 hand-lettered numerals arranged in rows, numbered 1 to 20. Each numeral is drawn in a calligraphic script with thick and thin strokes and long decorative flourishes and loops. The drawings are in solid black on a plain white background, evenly spaced across the sheet.

Lettering Number Numeral Script Flourish Calligraphy Flash sheet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The king's tax-counter had kept the numbers plain for forty years, one stroke for one sheep, and nobody in Harrowmere thought to complain until the day the new scribe, a thin girl called Wenna Sallow, hung her first ledger in the market square. Every figure in it had a tail. The ones had curling heads like a shepherd's crook, the twos bent over like dancers, and the tens looped themselves into knots a man could lose a thumb in.

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The treasurer came to shout at her. He stood before the board with his arms folded and read the total aloud, then read it again, because the flourishes made him stumble. "Why," he demanded, "must a seven wave at me?" Wenna said a plain seven could be altered by a clever hand in a single stroke, but a seven with a long hook at its foot could not be touched without the whole sheet looking like a bird had walked across it. The treasurer grumbled, but he paid the next levy in her figures, and then the next.

By midsummer the merchants read the curls faster than the old straight marks, and the thieves gave up trying to add a nought to anything. Wenna kept one sheet pinned above her desk, twenty numerals in three rows, and on quiet evenings she traced the nineteen with one finger until the lamp guttered.

The treasurer passed her door once, late, and asked what the sheet was for. Wenna blew out the lamp and said it was so the numbers would have something to hold onto. He did not ask again.