Black ink hand-drawn alphabet sheet showing capital letters A to Z in an ornate, sharp-serifed lettering style, suitable as a tattoo lettering reference.

Hand-drawn A to Z lettering sheet

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A grid of twenty-six uppercase letters, A to Z, arranged in five rows on a plain white background. Each letter is drawn in bold black ink with angular strokes, pointed terminals and decorative flourishes. The letters are evenly spaced, and the sheet is entirely black ink with no colour.

Lettering Alphabet Letter Lettering

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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

Every autumn the rain came down on the Thursday market at Holloway Cross, and every autumn Mabel Quint stood under her sheet of oilcloth with a pot of black ink and a brush of squirrel hair, lettering names onto tin for the stallholders who could not write them. She had a knack for capitals. The old men said her A had a spur on it like a church roof, and her Z hooked back on itself so the rain could not get in.

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One year a stranger came with a barrow of cracked crockery and asked her to letter a sign for a shop that had no name. He would not say what it sold. She asked what he wanted it to say. He said, 'Whatever the letters want to be.' She thought him mad, but the coin was good, so she took the tin and worked through the wet afternoon, drawing each letter from A to Z in her plainest hand, then letting the flourishes run where the ink wanted them.

When she finished, the Z was still wet and the rain had stopped. The stranger was gone, and so was the barrow, and no shop stood anywhere along the market. Only the tin was left on her board, with twenty-six letters standing in their rows, and each one seemed to look back at her a little sharper than she had drawn it. She tried to wipe the Z with her thumb. The ink would not move.

Mabel nailed the tin above her stall and sold nothing from under it for a month. People came to ask what it spelled. She told them it was the alphabet, which was the truth, and that the rain would tell them the rest if they waited. On wet days, the old men say, you can still hear the pointed letters tapping on the tin, one after another, as if they are searching for the word they were made to spell.