Black ink drawing of an ornate decorative capital letter with filigree patterning and curling flourishes on white paper, shown as a tattoo design.

Ornate decorative letter in ink

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A large decorative capital letter is drawn in black ink on white paper, with its strokes filled with fine hatching, dotted detail and intricate scroll patterns. Swirling flourishes extend from the lower and right sides of the letter, and small curls sit at its left and top edges. The composition is centred and filled with solid black and white contrast, with no colour.

Lettering Letter Ornament Filigree Flourish Swirl Scroll Pattern

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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 ink is still tacky when you lift the sheet to the lamp, and the street outside Corvin Lane has gone quiet except for the rattle of the last tram heading for the depot. You have been at this drawing since nine. The letter is a capital L, or it began as one, and it has grown the way a hedge grows when nobody is watching: hatching climbing the stem, dotted rings sprouting from the foot, scrolls spilling sideways until the whole page seems to lean into a wind.

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Mr Hallam, who ordered it for his grandfather's bindery, wanted something that would look old without looking dead. His only instruction was a single line: make it walk. So you have made it walk. The flourish pouring from the base unspools across the paper in long ribboned waves, and the curl at the top left holds a small hard eye that you spent forty minutes shading so it would catch the light. At half past eleven the night watchman from the bank opposite leans in the doorway, lifts his cap and asks what the letter is for. You tell him it is for a door that has not been painted yet.

He studies it for a long while. 'Looks like a key,' he says. 'Or a hook.' You nod, because it could be both, and because you have only now noticed that the largest scroll, if you follow its edge with your eye, bends round into a second letter, a rounded O tucked inside the L's tail. You did not intend that. Perhaps the hand knew something the head had not yet been told.

When he has gone you dip the finest nib and write your own initial at the very end of the smallest curl, where nobody searching for a signature would think to look. The ink takes slowly. Outside, the first bakery van turns into the lane and its headlights sweep the window, and for a moment the page glows as though someone has switched the letter on.