Black and grey lettering tattoo reading Money in script on the back of a hand, with a large stylised letter and shaded scroll details above.

Money lettering on the back of a hand

Lettering · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows the word Money in a flowing script, placed beneath a large stylised block letter with a crown-like top. Soft shading and outlined scrollwork frame the lettering, with grey tones giving the letters depth. The composition is centred across the back of the hand, with the knuckles and fingers visible below.

Lettering Hand Money Script Letter Crown Scroll

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down by the stove and take your boots off, you'll want to hear this properly. This is about Walter Pell, who lettered the scrip for the Cannock Mill Company back when the pit shut and the men were paid in paper nobody could spend outside the county. Walter had hands as steady as a plumb line, and he could make a capital M lean forward as if it was late for something.

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Every Friday he sat in the upstairs room above Hartley's hardware with a sable brush, a jar of lamp black and a ruler older than the town hall. The company wanted the word MONEY across the face of every note, and the bosses wanted it in a fancy hand, because a fancy hand made a man feel rich. Walter gave them the iron crown first, a little coronet at the top, then the big block letter with its shadows cut deep so it seemed to stand up off the page. Last came the script, loose and swinging, with curls at the ends he drew without lifting the brush once.

Then, one autumn in fifty-six, a clerk brought him a sheet with the crown gone and a plain cross in its place. The company man laughed and said who'd notice. Walter noticed. The shading was lighter and impatient, nothing like his own, and he knew whose hand it was because Dennis, his son, had been practising in the back room with a borrowed pen.

Walter never told the bosses. He sat with that sheet until the lamp guttered, then drew the crown back on, thick and black, and wrote the flowing word beneath it so the boy would see the difference and learn it. Dennis never did get the curl right at the foot of the M, and to this day you can tell a Pell note from a forgery by that one loose stroke.