Six black script lettering samples of the word 'Ohana on a white background, shown as tattoo flash in varying weights and flourishes.

'Ohana lettering in several script styles

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A design sheet showing the word 'Ohana written out six times in different script typefaces. The samples range from thin, delicate hairline strokes to bold, heavy letterforms, with swashes on the capital O and the h. All samples are in solid black on a plain white background with no body or skin visible.

Lettering Ohana Script Lettering Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dorrie Penhallow had been lettering boats in Newlyn for thirty-one years, and she knew a bad brief when she read one. The woman on her step had written the word on the back of a fish receipt: 'Ohana. Underneath, in smaller capitals, she had added: it means family, not only the ones you are born to.

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Dorrie laid six sheets along the bench under the lamp and let her pencil wander. The first was a hairline, thin as mono-filament, its capital O lifting high like a gull off the breakwater. The second was all weight and shoulder, the kind of letter that tells a harbour wall to mind itself. The third had a swash on the h that curled back on itself like a rope coiled on deck. None was right. The fifth leaned into the wind a little, the way a boat does when the tide turns under her, and she tapped it twice with the pencil.

The widow's husband had kept his boat, the Marigold, afloat for nineteen years on the rent of four men who were not his kin. When Dorrie asked who they were, the woman counted them off on her fingers, then stopped at seven and said there were more on the slipway who would turn up if you asked them.

Dorrie painted the transom that Saturday in black enamel, the fifth lettering, scaled up until the O was the width of a man's chest. When it was dry she took a small brush and, under the final a, wrote the initials of all seven men in a line so fine you had to stand close to read them. The widow asked why she had not been told. Dorrie said a sign ought to show who stood behind it.