Flash sheet of black kanji characters in a brush script style, each labelled with its English meaning such as beauty, courage, love and star, with no body placement shown.

Kanji flash sheet with English meanings

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A flash sheet of twenty-four black kanji characters arranged in six rows of four on a plain white background. Each character has a small printed English label beneath it, such as beauty, harmony, courage, wisdom, peace, moon, star and gold. The strokes are bold, brush-like and solid black, with no shading or colour.

Lettering Kanji Character Calligraphy Friend Courage Love Peace Moon Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The crate had been sitting in bay seven for three days when Mrs Okonedo asked me to sort the paperwork, and I told her the paperwork was the easy part. Inside were twenty-four sheets of ink-black characters, each one printed with a small English word beneath, as if someone had wanted the buyer to know exactly what they were getting. Harmony. Courage. Wild. I could read none of the shapes, only the labels, and the labels had been set in the same typeface as a hundred cheap calendars.

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The consignee arrived on Thursday in a grey wool coat. He said his name was Teodor Hale and that he had come for the moon. He pointed at the sixth row, at the hooked stroke beside the bent bough, and said the label was wrong. Not wrong exactly, he said, but incomplete. On its own it meant the moon. On a page written by a person who had walked home late and was not afraid of the dark, it meant the moon that lights the road. I asked how he knew. He said his grandmother had taught him to hold the brush with a loose wrist, letting the stroke decide its own weight, and that a printer who had never done that would always miss the middle of the mark.

I signed the release. I should probably not have. A sheet of calligraphy is not a restricted good, and the form had no box for what he had just told me. He rolled the pages into a cardboard tube, paid the storage fee in coins, and at the door he turned back, looked at the wall of labels, and tapped GOLD with one knuckle. That one is fine, he said. Gold is always gold.

That evening I walked the fence line to my car. Low over the marsh the moon sat in a gap of cloud, and for the first time in eleven years I looked at it the way he had looked at the page, with a loose wrist, letting the shape tell me what it meant.