Two black brush-style kanji characters stacked vertically, with the English labels True and Love beneath them, shown as a flash design in Japanese style.

Kanji for true and love

Japanese · Black and grey · Flash

Two stacked kanji characters are drawn in bold black brush-style strokes on a white background. The upper character is labelled TRUE and the lower character is labelled LOVE in small capitals. The linework is solid black with no shading, and the composition is centred and simple.

Japanese Kanji Love Calligraphy Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The brush is too stiff for the damp, and you say so, but Hal Probert only shrugs and hands you the ink stone anyway. The narrowboat Patience has been moored at Braunston since March, its roundhouse hatches swollen shut, and the name along her side has flaked to a grey ghost. You have been hired to repaint it. Hal wants two characters beneath the name, and he will not say what they mean until the paint is dry.

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You work through the first morning with the cabin door open to the towpath. A cyclist slows, reads the characters upside down, and asks whether they are Chinese. You tell him Japanese, then wonder if that is right. Hal says it hardly matters, because the men who first carried those shapes across the water never cared whether anyone could read them, only that they were carried true. He taps the upper stroke with a dry finger. You draw it from the top down, slow and deliberate, as if measuring a plank.

By noon the lower character is going on, and it takes three attempts because the ink bleeds in the wet air. Hal watches from the lock gate with his pipe unlit. When you finish he asks you to read them aloud, so you do, true first and then love, and the lock keeper looks up from his ledger at the sound of it.

That's backwards, Hal says, grinning. You put the true above the love so the love has something to stand on. You wipe the brush on your sleeve and the black comes off on the cotton. Hal runs his thumb along the wet lines, checks for smudges, and nods at the water. Somewhere below the lock a horn sounds, and the boat, which has not moved in months, lifts a little on her ropes as though she had been waiting for the words.