Black flourished script reading Live Out Loud on a white background, a lettering design suitable for a tattoo with no body placement shown.

Live Out Loud script lettering design

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

The image shows the words Live Out Loud set on three stacked lines in a flowing copperplate-style script. The letters are drawn in solid black with long, looping swashes and curled tails extending from the capitals and the ends of the words. The design is rendered in clean, even linework on a plain white background, with no shading or colour.

Lettering Script Lettering Flourish Quote

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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 boat was called Marguerite and she had not been out past the breakwater since the winter the fleet lost two men off Scarrow. You are the one who suggested the run anyway, because the mackerel were showing off the point and Dad's cough had finally let him sleep. Your brother Owen says nothing when you cast off. He just coils the ropes the way he was taught, in big slow loops, and tells you the swell is wrong. It is wrong. You can feel it in your back teeth.

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By noon the sky has gone the colour of wet slate and the gulls have all gone home. You haul the net by hand because the winch has started to shriek, and every fish you lift flashes silver and then goes dull, as if the light has been turned down on it. Owen shouts over the wind about the harbour light. You do not look for it. You look at the swirl of the water where it curls back on itself, the long unbroken arcs of it, and you think how it is like watching ink bloom in a glass. Then the mast light bends and the boat rolls, and the world goes white.

When the Tyne lifeboat finds you, you are both sitting in the wheelhouse with the engine dead and the bilge pump singing. Owen is laughing, which is what he does when he is frightened. You are holding the rail so hard your hands will not open. Somebody wraps a foil blanket round your shoulders and asks if you are hurt, and you say no, and then, for reasons you will spend years failing to explain, you say the thing your grandmother used to shout from the harbour wall whenever a boat went out: go on, then, and be seen.

Next spring Owen has a line of handwriting inked across the back of his forearm, all looping tails and swoops. He tells the artist to keep the capitals big. He says the words belong to the old woman on the wall, and to the boat, and to you, for having the nerve to come home at all.