Black ink hand lettering of the word Possibilities in a flowing script with a sweeping underline swash, drawn on a pale grey background, in a lettering style.

Possibilities script lettering with underline swash

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

The word Possibilities is drawn in a flowing, joined script with thick and thin strokes and a tall looping P. A long double-stroke swash runs beneath the letters and curls up into the final letter. The piece is in solid black ink on a pale grey, softly lit surface with no skin or body part visible.

Lettering Script Swash Word

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

Sit nearer the oven, you'll want the warmth on your hands. Nobody in Hebden Lane had the sense to ask Mrs Ostrowska why she kept the lamp lit past four, so I'll tell you what she told me. Her husband Teodor had hands like wet sacking and a pen like a swallow's wing, and he could make a word lean as if it were listening for the weather. He lettered the shop sign in 1956, then the menus, then the little cards tucked into the bread baskets.

Keep reading

The word he loved best was the one that never fitted a card. Possibilities, he'd write, and the P would climb up the page like a man hauling himself over a wall, while the final s curled back under itself like a cat asleep on a radiator. He wrote it on a flour sack the week their daughter was born, on the back of a coal bill, and on the slate by the door, where early customers read it before they were awake enough to buy anything.

Teodor died in the hard January, and for a month the slate sat blank. Mrs Ostrowska wiped the bench, kneaded, sold her rye, and said nothing to anyone about the word. Then one black morning she took the chalk, stood on the step stool, and drew the long double stroke beneath the letters, thick where the pressure fell and thin where it lifted, the way he had taught her with a wet finger on the counter. Her loop at the end came out lopsided. She left it.

The first customer that day was a boy with frost on his collar. He frowned at the slate and asked what it was supposed to say. Mrs Ostrowska wiped her hands on her apron, pulled a warm loaf from the tray, and said, "Read it again in a minute. It changes when there's someone reading." Then she went back to the ovens, where the dough was already rising, slowly, the way it always had.