Black brush-script lettering reading grateful with a small outlined heart on a white background, a tattoo design with no body shown.

Grateful lettering with heart

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A bold black brush-script word reading grateful, with the letters looping and joined together. A small outlined heart sits to the right of the final letter. The design is drawn in solid black ink on a plain white background with no shading or colour.

Lettering Heart Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Chancellor wanted the word four hundred times before the frost, one for every boat the Varnhollow fleet had lost to the Skerry storms, and he wanted each copy neat enough to frame. I have copied the king's decrees for nineteen winters without once being asked to write a word I did not mean, so I dipped my pen, wrote the first letter and let my wrist decide the rest.

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It decided to loop. The g swung down and hooked the a, the a leaned into the l, and by the fortieth copy the whole word ran together like wet rope. Master Tollin sent a boy to say the sheets were illegible. I told the boy that gratitude was never tidy in a hand that had not slept, and he went away looking as if I had cursed him.

On the ninety-first copy the widow Ysolde Penn came up the Hall steps to collect a sheet for her husband's name, which she could not read but wanted held in her fingers anyway. She traced the loops with a thumb, stopping at the final letter where the pen had lifted. "It's been left open," she said. "Like a gate."

So I closed nothing. I drew a small heart beside the last letter, outlined only, the way my mother drew them on the flour sacks, and I gave the sheet to her without a seal. She folded it twice and tucked it inside her shawl, and the Chancellor, when he saw the stack, said nothing at all, which in that Hall counts as praise.