Pencil-style drawing of a tattoo design with the word Love in ornate script, a large swash L, leaves and buds in black and grey.

Ornate script Love with botanical flourishes

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

The design spells the word Love in flowing script, with a tall decorative L whose stroke carries curling swirls. Small leaves, rosebuds and tiny hearts branch out from the letters along the flourishes. The linework is dark and sketchy, with soft grey shading that gives the lettering and leaves some depth on a plain white background.

Lettering Botanical Love Script Lettering Flourish Leaves Rosebud Heart 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

The capital L had taken Dev three attempts, and Ruth let him watch her draw the loop of it again, the nib lifting so the ink thinned to a hair before swelling back. "Don't push the swell," she said. "Let the pen do the work and keep your wrist still."

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He nodded at the paper, not at her. The commission was for a wedding invitation that had to be posted by Friday, and it had to say one word, Love, in a hand that looked grown rather than drawn. Ruth had done the flourishes herself for thirty years: rosebuds at the tail of each stroke, small leaves curling off the crossbar as if they had been left out in the rain and decided to climb.

By eleven the sheet was spoiled twice over. Ruth took the pen from him and showed him the grey, the trick of going over a stroke a second time with a lighter hand so the letters looked remembered rather than written. Walter had written her name on the back of a tram ticket that way, forty years ago, and she still kept it in the biscuit tin under the sewing box, soft as cloth from handling.

Dev finished at half past one, his shoulders aching. Ruth watched him set down the last tiny heart in the curve of the e, where no guest would look unless they went searching. "Most people never find the hearts," she said, blotting the page. "That was always the point of them."