Pen drawing of flowing script lettering with looped capitals and long swashes on a pale paper background, a lettering design for a possible tattoo.

Flowing script lettering on paper

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A handwritten script word is drawn in thin, dark ink on a pale, textured sheet of paper. The letters have looping ascenders, connected strokes and long trailing swashes that sweep across the composition at a diagonal. The linework is fine and even, with slightly heavier pen pressure at the joins, and the image is shot from a low angle with soft, even lighting.

Lettering Script Lettering Handwriting Swash

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 Nell, The scaffold came down on Tuesday, and the mason from Kendal swore the north wall will stand another century if nobody leans on it. I have leaned on everything else this month, so I may as well lean on a pen. You will laugh, but I have been copying the lettering off the chapel lintel, words cut above the door by someone with a far steadier hand than mine.

Keep reading

The stone has worn so that only the swashes survive, long tails running off the edge of the arch as if they had somewhere better to be. Mr Dorrance says the first word is 'what' and the rest has gone to rain. I traced it on tracing paper, then on my good cartridge sheet, then on the back of a builder's invoice, pressing harder at the joins where the old chisel must have paused. Each time I finished, I could not tell whether the phrase was a prayer or a question the mason asked himself while he worked.

Yesterday the light came low across the courtyard and the ink went silver on the page, and I thought: what if he was only asking whether it would hold? Whether the arch would bear the weight of the people who came after. I have decided he was not talking about the stone at all.

So I am staying on through the autumn, with the swifts gone and the nettles pushing up through the tiles. Send me the blue tin of nibs and tell Mum I am eating. The final swash is the best thing I have drawn in years, and it is for nobody but him. Your loving sister, Ruth.