Black linework alphabet sheet of ornate lettering in a traditional style, with numerals and symbols, shown as a tattoo lettering design.

Ornate tattoo lettering alphabet sheet

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A specimen sheet of decorative capital letters, accented characters, numerals and symbols drawn in black outline with inner line detailing. The letterforms have swashes, curled terminals and shaded inner strokes in a traditional lettering style. The characters are arranged in evenly spaced rows on a plain white background.

Lettering Traditional Alphabet Lettering Number Symbol

Find an artist for this

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

Maud had the pattern book open on the bench for three days before the wedding board came in, its spine cracked at the page of swash capitals. The couple wanted both surnames across the top in the old style, and the groom's name carried a slashed O that the book had never needed. She drew the Ø twice in pencil, then rubbed it out with her thumb and started again.

Keep reading

Her father had taught her that a letter drawn with a ruler looks dead. The curl at the end of a stroke has to look as though the hand let go of it by itself. He had worked at this bench for forty years, and his brushes still stood in a jar by the window, their handles worn to the shape of his grip. She mixed a dull black from lamp soot and gum arabic and loaded a number two liner.

The board went out in a van to a barn outside Hitchin, where the bride's aunt met her at the door with a list of corrections and a box of sparklers. Maud fixed the spacing on the hanging day, working on a stepladder while the caterers argued about trestles. When the last shading was dry she climbed down and stood back, and for a moment the letters seemed to lean toward the light from the open doors.

That night, alone in the workshop, she looked closer and found it. Tucked into the inner stroke of the final S, so small that only someone holding a loupe would see it, was a tiny M, shaded the way her father shaded everything. She had not put it there. She sat for a while with the jar of brushes, then picked up the liner and, under the M, added a letter of her own.