Flash sheet of hand-lettered phrases in black ink on white paper, with two pale blue panels patterned with small stars, shown as lettering designs rather than on skin.

Hand-lettered phrase sheet with star panels

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A sheet of black hand-lettered phrases in mixed typefaces, including script, block capitals and sketched outlines, arranged in a grid of short lines. Two pale blue rectangles dotted with small star shapes sit in the top and middle right corners as decorative panels. The linework is clean and mostly unshaded, with no colour ink, and the layout is tightly packed with the words repeated across rows.

Lettering Lettering Phrase Script Star Flash sheet

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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

The night porter at St Aidan's kept a sheet of paper folded in his breast pocket, and he took it out every time the clock above the ward doors struck three. Nobody knew where he had got it. It had lines in every sort of hand, some printed in blocks and some curled like smoke, and a few pale blue panels scattered with little stars.

Keep reading

One February, a young nurse named Bridie came on shift with a face like wet paper. She did not say what had happened and he did not ask. He unfolded the sheet on the desk and smoothed it flat with the side of his hand. She read the line about the sun rising and then read it again, slower, the way you read a bus timetable when you are not sure you are going the right way.

They sat through the small hours together. A man in bay four rang for water every twenty minutes, and each time the porter brought it he said the same thing, that the morning was coming whether anyone wanted it or not. Bridie laughed once, a short cough of a laugh. Around five she took a pencil from behind her ear and copied a line onto the back of her hand, the one about the night not being the end.

At six the windows went grey, then pale gold. The porter folded the sheet along its creases and put it away. 'Keep it,' he said, though it was his. Bridie pulled her sleeve down over the ink and went home to sleep. The following week she came back with a cup of tea and a new pencil, and the two of them kept watch until the light came up over the car park.