Flash sheet of ornate blackletter capital letters A to Z in black line work with floral flourishes, styled as lettering designs.

Ornate blackletter alphabet A to Z

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A sheet of twenty-six ornamental blackletter capitals, arranged in rows from A to Z. Each letter is drawn in fine black linework with hatching, shading and scrolling acanthus-style leaves and curls. The letters are set on a plain white background in a neat grid, with the final Z centred on the bottom row.

Lettering Alphabet Letter Blackletter Floral ornament Scroll Foliage

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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 stonecutter's widow hands you the mallet before she hands you the chisel, because she says the wood tells you more than the stone. You are fourteen, and the garden behind the workshop is choked with acanthus that has gone wild over the wall, leaves curling like the ends of a badly written word. Every morning you sit on the bench with a pencil and copy her alphabet from a vellum sheet she keeps pinned under a flat stone so the wind cannot take it.

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The capitals are the hard part. A plain A is easy, any clerk can make one. Hers grow shoots from their shoulders and tendrils from their feet, and the leaves must look as if weather has eaten them and they have grown back anyway. She makes you draw the F eleven times before she lets you touch the stone. Her hatching is so fine you need a lens to see it, and when you ask why she bothers, she says nobody reads a churchyard in a hurry.

In October you finish the Z, the last in the row, and she insists it sits alone at the bottom where a reader's eye comes to rest. You cut it into a slab of grey Portland for a grave that belongs to a family you will never meet. The stone leaves on a lorry on a Tuesday, and you forget it the way you forget most work once it is gone.

Years later she walks you up the hill to the far corner of the cemetery and stops at a stone you do not recognise. The Z curls over a name you have never read, and in the groove where the leaves meet the stem someone has pushed a small green sprig. She taps the slab twice with her knuckle, the way you knock on a door you expect to be answered, and says nothing at all, which is how you know she has been waiting for you to stop and look.