Black ink script lettering reading New York, framed by looping flourishes, drawn as a tattoo design on a plain white background.

New York script lettering with flourishes

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

Hand-drawn script wording reading New York, with looping swashes extending above, below and around the letters. The linework is a uniform black outline with no shading or fill, on a plain white background. The centred composition forms a rounded, cloud-like frame around the lettering.

Lettering Script Lettering Flourish Swash

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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 swash over the N came out wrong twice before the bakery woke, so on the third try I stopped correcting it and let the brush go where my wrist wanted. Mr Halloran's boy stood below the ladder with a cup of tea going cold, asking whether the words would fit the window or whether I'd have to start again on the far side of the street. They would fit. They always fit, if you let the loops do the crowding.

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I learned lettering from my uncle, who painted every hand-lettered sign between the Battery and Harlem for thirty years and never once wrote a plain capital in his life. He said a New York sign had to look like it was in a hurry, and a hurry needs room to turn around in. So the Y dropped under the line like a ferry rounding its slip, the K curled back on itself the way the el does at Chambers Street, and the whole word sat inside a cloud of curls so it could breathe.

Mrs Oyelaran, who owned the bakery, climbed the ladder herself at dusk to see the finished letters. She ran her thumb along the bottom swash and said it looked as though the city was trying to hold on to something. I told her it was only a pen stroke. She laughed and said that was how most things in this city had started.

I walked home past the same window that night. The gold had not dried. The loops caught the lamplight and held it, and for once I did not want to correct a single one of them.