Black and grey flowing script lettering arranged in the shape of a cross, drawn on pale paper as a tattoo design with no body placement shown.

Script lettering arranged as a cross

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A hand-drawn design of a Latin cross made entirely from cursive script lines of text, with soft grey shading beneath the letters. The lines of lettering follow the arms and upright of the cross, with words running in different directions. The image is in black and grey on a plain off-white background, with the design filling the centre of the frame.

Lettering Cross Script Lettering Text

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

Now sit down, you, and mind the pot. Old Tobias Renn cooked on the Mary Ellen for thirty-one years, and he never once lit the galley stove without saying a word over it. Not a prayer, mind, he'd tell you that himself. Just a word to keep the fire honest.

Keep reading

The winter the Mary Ellen went round the Horn, the sea took the forward hatch and half the biscuit with it. The men were grey with cold and quarrelling over the last of the salt pork. Tobias stood at his stove with his sleeves rolled and a ladle in his fist, and he wrote a letter to his daughter in Hull on the back of a tallow-stained chart. He copied out the words his mother had stitched in a sampler above her bed, and he set them in a cross, the way she had, so the lines ran up the stem and across the arms and every word turned a corner. Nobody aboard could read the thing the right way up, and that was the joke of it.

Then the ship heeled hard, the copper went over, and the whole galley flooded with black water. Tobias did not run. He knelt in the slop, held the chart clear above his head, and kept it dry while the men bailed around him. When the sea settled, the ink had run in only one place: the foot of the cross, where the last line sat.

His daughter got the letter in April. She turned it every way she could and read the blurred bottom line only once, the way you read a thing you already know. It was the stove-word, the one he always said. She kept the chart in her Bible and never did get to the bottom of why it made her weep.