Pencil flash sheet showing the word INSANE drawn in ten lettering styles, including script, blackletter, serif and an ornate design, for use as tattoo lettering.

Insane lettering flash sheet in ten styles

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A black and white pencil flash sheet with ten labelled variations of the word INSANE, set in styles such as script, blackletter, ornate, sans serif, serif and fancy serif. One version is shaped into a grinning mouth with teeth, and another sits on a curved, shaded banner. Shading uses graphite greys and hatching throughout, with no colour.

Lettering Lettering Script Blackletter Serif Teeth Mouth Banner

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ten days out of Valparaíso the sea had turned the colour of wet slate, and Tobias Quaile had run out of ways to avoid the bosun. Hollis wanted a word painted over the galley hatch, something to make the cook laugh, and he had set one rule: it had to be spelt out in full, in capitals, and it could not be the name of any ship that had gone down.

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So Tobias sat in the paint locker with a lamp swinging on its hook and drew the word ten ways. He tried a looping script first, the I running off the page like a wake. Then a blackletter that looked like a chapel door, and one set on a curve so it bowed like a hull seen from the gangway. He did one with the letters sitting inside a grin, all teeth, because the sea had been grinning at him since the Horn. Each attempt was a little more wrong than the last, and by the fourth night the word had stopped looking like a word at all.

On the eleventh morning the wind dropped flat and the watch came up to find the hatch still bare. Tobias had painted nothing. He had left the sketchbook open on the capstan, and Hollis stood reading it with his cap pushed back, tracing the grinning version with one thick finger. "That one," he said. "Paint that one." Tobias began to argue, then saw that the mate was smiling, and the smile matched the drawing exactly.

They painted it that afternoon in red lead, teeth first, and by dusk the whole crew had found a reason to walk past the galley hatch and grin back at it.