Pencil sketch of an interlocking script monogram in black and grey, drawn as a lettering design for a tattoo.

Interlocking script monogram sketch

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil sketch of several interlocking script letters with flowing loops, tails and swashes that overlap one another. The strokes use soft graphite shading and darker edges to suggest depth, on a plain white background. No body part or skin is visible.

Lettering Monogram Script Letter Swirl Sketch

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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 last ferry had already gone when Mrs Ailsa Dunn brought the drawing down to my workshop, folded twice in a tea towel, and asked me to make the letters look as though they were leaning into each other. I told her the loops would fight the paint. She said that was rather the point. Her husband had lettered the stern of the Morag Rose for thirty years before his hands gave out, and she wanted the new name done by someone who would not make it look like a shop sign.

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I spent three evenings on it at my kitchen table with a rigger brush and a jar of cold tea, practising the swashes on newsprint until the tails stopped snapping. The first letter wanted to climb over the second. The third kept trying to sit on the shoulder of the fourth. On the third night the wind swung round to the north-west and the window hummed in its frame, and I finally saw it. The letters were not fighting at all. They were holding each other up, the way the two of them had stood on the pier the summer the boat came back one man short.

I painted it on a wet Tuesday with the harbour grey behind me. When I had finished the last loop, Ailsa stood on the quay with her hands in her coat pockets and read the stern for a long time without speaking.

"There," she said at last. "That's them." I had left a small gap at the end of the final stroke, a space where the tail simply stopped, and I asked her if it looked unfinished. She shook her head. "No, love. That's where the next name goes."