Black and grey flash sheet of ornate script capital letters with swirling flourishes and shaded edges, intended as lettering designs for tattoos.

Ornate script alphabet flash sheet

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A hand-drawn flash sheet showing a full set of capital letters in an ornate, flowing script style. Each letter has bold black outlines, grey shading along one side and decorative swirls and curls extending from the strokes. The letters are arranged in a grid on a pale background with a thin black border.

Lettering Alphabet Letter Script Flourish Swirl

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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

Dev had been copying the same capital B for three weeks, and Mr Okafor kept rubbing it out with the side of his thumb. "Too tidy," he said, not looking up from the van door he was lettering. "A letter wants to lean on something." The flash sheet pinned above the bench had been Dev's only teacher: forty-odd capitals in a fat, shaded script, each one letting its curls spill past the edges as if it had somewhere better to be.

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The job came on a Thursday. Mrs Pryce from the eleventh floor of Hollins House wanted her late husband's name on the board above the corner shop that had sold him his newspapers for thirty years. The old lettering had flaked away to nothing. She brought a photograph and a tin of shortbread and stood in the doorway in her good coat while Dev worked.

He spent two evenings on the W. The stem came down in one long stroke, the grey fattened on the left like a shadow thrown by a lamp he couldn't see, and then the flourish, a loop that doubled back and curled under the last letter like a kite string caught in a gutter. Mr Okafor came round at closing, held the board at arm's length, and said nothing for so long that Dev began to pack up.

"That's the one," he said finally. "Tidy's gone. It leans." On the Monday Mrs Pryce came down in her coat, stood under the new name, and touched the W with one finger the way you'd check paint was dry. Then she bought a paper and climbed back up the stairs, and Dev stayed behind to wash his brushes while the last light came in low across the pavement.