Black and grey pencil drawing of the word Love in ornate script with sketched flourishes, leaves and swirls, shown as a tattoo design rather than on skin.

Ornate script design spelling Love

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A detailed sketch of the word Love written in an elaborate, decorative script. The letters are filled with fine hatched linework, small leaves, curling tendrils and scrolling flourishes, with a few dotted accents. The drawing is in black and grey on a pale, lightly shaded background and is centred in the frame.

Lettering Love Script Lettering Flourish Leaves Swirl Vine

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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

Dear Tom, I found the old copperplate workbook under the stairs when I was clearing Mum's flat, the one with your name inked on the cover in that wobbly hand. Inside, every page is the same word, LOVE, practised over and over until the nib must have spat ink across the margins. By the fourth page you were getting the loops right. By the ninth you had started hiding small leaves inside the O, and a curl of vine climbing up the L like it was trying to get away from the page.

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I sat on the bottom step with a cup of tea going cold and tried to remember why you stopped coming to the Saturday class. Mrs Harnett said your fingers cramped. You said the flourishes were showing off. I think now it was that every letter you made came out looking like something growing, and you did not want anyone to notice how much you had put into it.

The last page has only the V left unfinished, a long hairline stroke trailing off toward nothing, and beside it, in pencil, a single word I could not read until I tilted it to the window. It says Come. I have kept the workbook on the windowsill where the afternoon light catches the hatching, and every evening I finish the V myself, though I am no good at it, and leave the ink to dry overnight.