Black and grey drawing of an ornate capital letter R with curling scrollwork flourishes, shown as a tattoo design with no body placement visible.

Ornate scrollwork letter R design

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A large, ornate capital letter R drawn with flowing script strokes and curled scrollwork at the top, left and right. The thick strokes are shaded with grey gradients and streaks, while the outlines and swirls are clean black linework on a white background. The composition is centred and fills the frame, with no skin or body part visible.

Lettering Script Scrollwork Swirl Flourish

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The brush I used for the Glyn guesthouse board was a number nine sable, and I had it loaded with black enamel the morning the fog sat down over Bwlch Coch. Mrs Glyn stood at the foot of my ladder with her arms folded and told me the letter was wrong. It was an R, she said, not a rake, and she wanted it the way the old lettering ran across the chapel gate at Llanwyddelan.

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I had learned flourishes from my father, who painted hearse plates and bread vans for thirty years and never once let a curl go to waste. So I laid the stem first, a long leaning stroke like a walker's pole, then the bowl, then the scrolls that turned back on themselves at the top and the foot, the way the mountain road doubles on itself when it has nowhere else to go. Every curl had to finish where it started, or the eye would go looking for the hole in it.

For the shading I dragged a dry brush of grey along the thick strokes and streaked it so the light seemed to run down the pass like meltwater. Mrs Glyn went quiet at the rail. Then she said her husband had painted that same shadow on the board the year they married, before the road was tarred and the coaches stopped stopping, and I did not ask what had become of him.

By noon the fog had lifted and the board stood white against the grey rock, the R standing up out of it as if the hill had grown it there. The first coach came down the switchbacks with its lamps still burning. Mrs Glyn paid me in eggs and a shilling and told me, one last time, that it was not a rake. I still think of it as a rake every time I drive that road.