Black ink flash design of three Chinese characters stacked vertically, labelled in capitals as love, peace and happiness, on a white background.

Love, peace and happiness characters

Black and grey · Flash

The image shows three stacked Chinese characters in bold black brushstroke-style lettering on a plain white background. Each character has a printed English translation beneath it in small serif capitals: LOVE, PEACE and HAPPINESS. The lines are solid and even, with no shading or colour, so the sheet reads as a clean design drawing.

Chinese character Love Peace Lettering

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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 marquee smells of cut grass and warm sponge cake, and the best man is tapping a microphone that refuses to speak. You are holding the envelope Aunt Maud pressed into your hand at the gate, soft at the corners from being carried all afternoon. Inside is a single sheet of rice paper with three characters brushed in black ink, stacked like fence posts.

Keep reading

Under the trestle table you unfold it. Iris catches your eye from the top table, her veil pinned up with two combs, and mouths something you cannot read. She taught you to brush these when you were nine, in Maud's back bedroom with the radiator ticking. Press on the downstroke, lift on the hook, and let the wrist do nothing, Maud kept saying, the wrist is only a hinge. You thought she was being strict. Now you think she was showing you how to hold anything you cared about.

The note is short. Love comes first because it is the hardest to hold without squeezing. Peace comes second, and it arrives only once you have stopped trying to force it. Happiness comes last, because it never waits to be invited and will sit down at the wrong table if you let it. Turn the paper over and there is a pencilled sketch of the final stroke, the one she never managed to get right, with the words: Iris will finish this one.

You stand. The microphone finally crackles. You read the first two lines in a voice you barely recognise, then hold up the sheet and say that Iris has the last stroke. She laughs, already walking towards you with the pen between her fingers and the veil swinging loose behind her.