Black lettering design of three Chinese characters with the English words live, laugh and love printed beneath them, shown on a plain white background with no body placement.

Live laugh love in Chinese characters

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

The image shows three bold black Chinese characters set in a row, each paired with a lowercase English word below it reading live, laugh and love. The brushstroke-style characters have thick and thin strokes and sit on a plain white background. The design is in solid black with no shading or colour, and the composition is centred and evenly spaced.

Lettering Chinese character Love Script Word

Find an artist for this

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 lettering man came up to our landing on a Tuesday with a tin of white gloss and a folded sheet of paper, and he asked Nan whether she wanted the words in Chinese or English, because the council only paid for one. She said both. He said that would be double. She said she had been paying the council for forty-one years and they could stand a bit of double.

Keep reading

So the three words went up beside the lift doors on the eighth floor, where the lift had been broken since March and everyone walked up with their shopping and their bad knees. The English sat small underneath, live, laugh, love, and above it the Chinese characters stood tall and black, thick strokes and thin ones, as if someone had written them in a hurry and meant every line. Nobody on the block could read them, but everybody read them, slowly, on the way up.

Mrs Lin from flat 22 stopped one afternoon with her bags and tilted her head at the middle character for a long time. Then she laughed, properly. The lettering man had copied it from a calendar and put one stroke in the wrong place, and she said it now looked like someone who had sat down too quickly. Ruby from the second floor asked what it said. Mrs Lin told her it said exactly what the wall said, and that the mistake was the only honest part.

Nan wanted it painted over. Mrs Lin wouldn't let her. Most Sundays Ruby still stops on the landing, points at the crooked character and says the three words back to us, slowly, the way she was taught, and we all climb the rest of the way up still laughing at it.