Sample sheet of fifteen tattoo-style lettering fonts in black and red, with names such as Billion Stars and Bleeding Cowboys, under a playing card spade emblem.

Free tattoo fonts sample sheet

Lettering · Mixed · Flash

A sheet of fifteen script and blackletter style typefaces, each set in its own sample line with the font name shown beside it. Most lines are in black, with several in red, and the lettering has ornate flourishes, pointed capitals and rough, distressed edges. The layout is a plain vertical list on a white background, with a red spade graphic and a stylised TATTOO heading at the top.

Lettering Lettering Script 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

Mrs Ardell had me paint her name over the door of the Sea Lark before the paint on the window frames had dried, and she stood on the pavement with her arms folded while I worked. "Something with a bit of swagger," she said. "Not those Sunday school capitals." I had a sheet of samples pinned inside my tin box, fifteen ways of making a word look like it had been in a fight and won, and I picked the one called Bleeding Cowboys because it made her laugh out loud.

Keep reading

The trouble came on the Thursday. A man came up from the harbour with a brown paper parcel under his arm and asked whether I could do his boat's name in red, no black at all. I said I could, though I had only the one red brush that wasn't split. He wanted the words Brother Tattoo, which he said was a joke between him and his brother, who had been dead nine years and had never once been allowed to choose a font. I painted it in the wine-coloured script from the sheet. He paid in coins and didn't look at the lettering at all.

By the end of the week the whole front of the terrace had been done over, and the sea wind had taken the edges off every word I'd laid down. Mrs Ardell said the Sea Lark looked like a place where people came to be disappointed in a good way. I told her that was the best thing anyone had said about my work.

On Sunday I found the sample sheet had blown out of my box onto the shingle. I kept it. Some nights I still trace the little red spade in the corner with my thumb, and wonder which of those fifteen names the man would have picked for his brother, if the brother had ever been given a say.