Black line drawing flash sheet of an ornate blackletter capital alphabet with floral flourishes, suitable as lettering designs for a tattoo.

Ornate blackletter capital alphabet sheet

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A flash sheet of decorative capital letters in a blackletter style, arranged in rows across the page. Each letter is outlined in fine black linework, with some areas filled in solid black and others left open, and scrolling vines and curls surround them. The sheet is monochrome on a white background, with the letters evenly spaced in a grid.

Lettering Traditional Alphabet Blackletter Filigree Flourish Scrollwork

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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 letters came in a crate marked with the wrong port, and Brother Anselm spent the first week of the crossing sorting them by the light of a lantern that smoked whenever the ship rolled. A flash sheet, the printer had called it: twenty-six capitals drawn in a hand that was not a monk's hand but was close enough, every stem thick with black and then worked open again with hairline curls, vines climbing out of the ink like they had somewhere to be. He had been hired to letter the ship's register, and he meant to do it in plain Roman. Ships' clerks did not need ornament. But the captain's daughter, who could not read and did not want to be told so, kept coming down to the hold to point at the letters and ask what they were called.

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So he taught her. A is for Alder, which is a tree she had never seen. D is for Dun, the colour of the sails in the doldrums. He ran out of honest words by the time he reached Q, and she began inventing her own, and the inventions were better than his. By the Azores the register had grown a border of vines in the margins, and the captain, who had opposed every line of it, stood over the page and asked who had been drawing on his book.

Nobody confessed. The sea took a day to settle and by then the girl had gone up on deck with a stub of charcoal, drawing a capital on the planking where the rope was coiled. Anselm found her at dusk tracing the same curl again and again, the way you test a new pen. He told her the letters were only shapes until someone needed them to mean something. She looked at the wet wood, then at him, and said the shapes already meant the voyage, and she was not going to be sorry for them.