Grey brush-script lettering reading 'His beloved.' on a plain white background, a lettering design suited to a tattoo.

'His beloved' script lettering design

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

The image shows the handwritten phrase 'His beloved.' in flowing brush-script lettering on a plain white background. The strokes vary in weight, with thick downstrokes on the H and b and finer connecting loops, and the ink is a soft charcoal grey with slight texture. The composition is a single horizontal line of text, centred with generous white space around it.

Lettering Script Word

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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

Pim had lettered boats along Whitby harbour for thirty-one years, and he knew a sorrowful customer by the way they stood at the counter, as if the floor might give. Mrs Scarr stood like that on a wet Tuesday, a folded sheet of notepaper in one glove and a shilling she had counted twice in the other. "Across the stern," she said. "Under the name. Just those words, and leave the name off."

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He asked which words. She opened the paper. It was a letter in a man's square pencil, the kind a deckhand scribbles on the back of a tally, and at its foot, underlined twice, were the words she wanted. "They were sewn inside his coat lining," she said. "He wrote one every time he was away and never once posted them. I don't know who he meant them for, Mr Pim. I only know they weren't for me."

Pim did not ask again. He mixed the gold size, ruled his faint pencil guides the way his old master had taught him, and when he came to the final word he let the brush drift into a long looping tail, the way his mother used to finish her capital Ss on the shop ledgers. He painted slowly, letting the thick downstrokes sit heavy and the joins go thin as thread.

When the paint was dry, Mrs Scarr walked the length of the quay to look at it. She stood a long time with one hand on the cold rail, reading it against the grey water. Then she came back, paid the shilling, and said only, "He always did finish his d like that." Pim understood then that she had known the hand all along.