Black Greek lettering tattoo set in five staggered lines across a person's shoulder and upper back, in a clean serif lettering style.

Greek lettering across a shoulder

Lettering · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo is five lines of Greek lettering in a clean serif script, set in black ink and staggered down the skin. The letterforms are crisp and even, with solid strokes and no shading. The photograph is taken close up at an angle, with a pink strap at the top right and visible freckles on the skin.

Lettering Shoulder Script Lettering Word

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

The lambing shed smelled of wet straw and iodine the February my uncle Yannis came back from the hospital in Lincoln with a sheet of paper folded small inside his coat. He did not say what the doctor had told him. He unfolded it on the feed bin, smoothed it flat with the heel of his hand, and pushed a stub of carpenter's pencil across to me.

Keep reading

The paper had five lines in his square capitals, the Greek he had learned as a boy outside Chania before the family came over to work the fields. λαγνεία για ζωή, he read out, the way the old men laughed about it in the kafenio, as if it were a dare. He wanted it inked on something he could keep. I told him I could not write Greek. He said I did not need to write it, only copy the shapes, and that the ewes would not mind if my letters leaned.

We worked all week with the stove roaring and the wind slamming the barn door. Each evening he added another line from memory, and each evening he made me read the old ones back to him. When we reached the second pair, he tapped the word for love and said the sentence was not finished until both halves were standing. I asked him why there were two kinds of lust. He shrugged and said one was for the land and the other was for the people still on it.

In April, after the last frost, the card hung above the bench beside the iodine and the spare crook. My letters had wobbled at the tails and one ζ sat lower than the others. Yannis stood in front of it with his hands in his pockets for a long time, then laughed and said they would do.