Black ink lettering design on white paper, with a decorative blackletter-style word surrounded by scrollwork and foliage, beside a fine black pen.

Ornate lettering design in black ink

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A hand-drawn lettering design on white paper shows a decorative word in a heavy, flowing script with swash strokes. Dense fine-line scrollwork, leaves and curls fill the space around and behind the letters, with shading built from hatching and stippling. The design is in black ink only, centred on the page with a fine black pen resting across its lower right corner.

Lettering Lettering Script Scrollwork Foliage Flourishes Pen

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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

Sit yourself down by the urn, my love, before the kettle sulks. You'll have seen the name over the front door, all that swooping black work like weed on a rock. That sign has hung there for sixty summers, and not one of the landladies before me could tell you how it got its curls. I can. Ask me properly and I'll tell it.

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It was the autumn after the big storm took the pier railings, and a draughtsman came off the Thursday boat with a leather case and a pen no thicker than a knitting needle. Mr Ambrose Tilley, he said, though he never once signed his work. He lodged in the back room where the damp comes through in the shape of a gull. Every evening he sat at the table with the window open, drawing our letters over and over, and every evening the sea came a little closer under the sill.

Three nights before the board was due at the ironmonger's, his ink ran dry. He sat staring at the blank corner of the paper, so I brought up a cup of tea and a jar of the marsh ink my husband used for the rent book. He laughed like a man who had been waiting for permission. Leaves want to grow where the letters bend, he said, and the curls want to go out to sea. By morning the whole board was furred with fern and scroll, thick as a hedge, and the last swash of the final letter ran off the edge of the wood and kept going.

He went back on the Thursday boat without his case. The sign hung crooked for a week until the men fixed it, and nobody has ever managed to lift that flourish off the paint. Look out of the bay window tomorrow and you'll see the curl points straight at the lighthouse, as if the name is still waiting for him to come back and finish it.