Black and grey blackletter lettering reading REGRET NOTHING across the upper arm.

Regret nothing lettering on upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo spells out the words REGRET on the upper line and NOTHING below it in an ornate blackletter style. The letters use bold black strokes with grey shading that gives them depth and a slightly raised look. The photograph is taken close up on the upper arm, with the text filling most of the frame against plain skin and a dark background.

Lettering Upper arm Lettering Text Blackletter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lad wanted the capitals heavier than Maureen Pask thought decent, so she mixed the grey twice before she touched the brush. Her father had taught her that blackletter forgave nothing. Every hairline had to be a decision, every spur a small argument with the stroke before it. She had spent thirty-odd years lettering pub signs and shopfronts along the Leeds Road, and the old gothic hands still came to her fingers quicker than anything modern.

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He stood at the bench reading her design upside down. "Regret," he said, tapping the first line, "then nothing. Like a full stop, except it's the whole sentence." She asked if he was sure. He said his nan had said the same thing when the council wanted her front wall knocked down in 1978, and she had never once looked back at it, not even when the lorries came. Maureen didn't tell him that she still walked past the empty plot most Tuesdays, out of habit, and still caught herself checking the wall.

She drew the frame first in pencil, then the spine of each letter, then the swelling. REGRET went on in one long pull of ink. When she reached NOTHING the N kept wanting to lean left, the way the N on her father's last board had leaned, and she let it, because some letters remember more than the hand that drew them.

Afterwards she sat with the sheet and a cold cup of tea and thought about the letter she had never sent to her brother in Canada. Then she pressed the grey into the final G until it sat proud of the paper, and signed the corner with her small M and P, the way she did on every board she had ever made.