Brown blackletter lettering design reading Old School on a white background, with swashed capitals and fine trailing strokes, shown as a flash design rather than on skin.

Old School blackletter lettering design

Lettering · Colour · Flash

The image shows the words Old School set in blackletter script, with tall, angular capitals and flourished strokes extending above and below the main lettering. The linework is solid and the letterforms are densely packed into a compact block. The letters are filled with a mottled brown and tan tone on a plain white background, with no skin or body part visible.

Lettering Blackletter Lettering Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourself down by the stove, the lamp's on the blink but my voice doesn't need it. You want to know about the sign over Mrs Pelham's door, the one with letters you could hang a coat on? I'll tell you how it came to be, and you can decide for yourself if it's true.

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Fifty winters back, Walter Quill came down to Cawsey Bay with a box of quills, a bottle of oxgall ink and a grudge against every sign-writer in Bristol who had called his work fussy. He took the room at the top of the boarding house for a shilling a night and paid his way in lettering. Every landlady on the front wanted her name done in gold leaf, and Walter obliged, but he would only work in the old black hand, the broken letters the monks used, all spikes and hooks that wanted a second look.

The trouble started when the new school opened on the hill, with its glass windows and its typewriters, and the headmaster declared the old ways finished. Walter laughed so hard he spilled his ink down the front step. That same night he painted OLD SCHOOL across the boarding house board, tall and crowded, the tails of the capitals reaching up like fishing hooks. The headmaster came down to complain, stood in the lamplight, and could not read a single letter of it. He walked home without a word.

Walter died in the autumn, and the tide took his box of quills off the end of the pier. The sign is still there, the brown gone the colour of weak tea, and every child on the front asks what it says. Tell them it says what it says. They'll work it out eventually, same as their grandparents did.