Pencil drawing of ornate script lettering with swirling flourishes and a shaded banner, shown on paper beside a black fineliner pen.

Script lettering design with flourishes

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing on cream paper shows a stylised word in looping script lettering, with a shaded banner or shield shape on the left and curling flourishes around the letters. The letters are rendered with hatched shading and fine outlines, giving them a dimensional, three-dimensional look. The image is in black and grey only, with the paper and a black fineliner pen placed diagonally across the lower right of the frame.

Lettering Script Lettering Flourish Banner

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

The pencil was still sharp when Walter handed it over, which Eli took as a bad sign. The old man had spent forty years lettering shopfronts in Deal and had never let an apprentice near the final flourish. "Hatching first," he said, tapping the sheet with a stained finger. "Shadow tells the eye which way the letters lean."

Keep reading

Eli worked through the afternoon in the back garden of the workshop, where a fig tree had pushed through the fence and the light came down green onto the paper. He drew the banner on the left, a curled shape like a pennant caught in wind, and filled its folds with fine lines. The word he copied from a brass plate in Walter's bottom drawer, the name of a nursery that had shut the winter before, and every loop he made felt like handling someone else's letter.

When he was done, the shading ran thick under the downstrokes and thin where the light would fall. He carried the drawing inside to show Walter, who squinted through his spectacles for a long time without speaking.

"You've put the shadow on the wrong side," the old man said at last, and reached for the black fineliner. He drew one hairline stroke beneath the banner's tail, curling it back on itself until it became a small pointed leaf. "There. Now it looks like it grew there." Eli looked from the leaf to the fig tree outside the window, and understood that the nursery had been named after this garden, and that the garden had never really closed.