Ink drawing of a script lettering design with swirling flourishes and leaf shapes on white paper, being traced with a fine liner pen.

Script lettering with flourishes on paper

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A hand holds a fine liner pen over a sheet of white paper showing a sketched tattoo design of stylised script lettering. Thick and thin black strokes form the letters, surrounded by fine hairline swirls, curls and leaf-like flourishes. The design is in black ink only, shown flat and centred on the page.

Lettering Fine line Script Lettering Flourish Swirl Leaves Pen

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

Mrs Pardoe had sent her boy down to the yard twice before Tobias agreed to paint the name. The Gull Marigold had gone out of Penhallow with her old name chipped off the transom, and the new owner wanted the letters done properly, with the loops his father had liked on the chapel boards. Tobias had a pot of lamp black, three sable brushes and a pen nib he filed himself, and he did not hurry.

Keep reading

He worked the first morning in pencil, one hand flat on the paper to keep it still. The capitals swung and thickened where the pressure fell, and he gave the tails long hairline curls that ran off like weed in the tide. Between the strokes he drew leaves no bigger than a thumbnail, pointed at both ends, the sort that grew on the hedges above the quay. A boy from the chandlery stood at his elbow and asked what the squiggles were for. "So the eye has somewhere to rest," Tobias said, though he was not sure that was true.

On the Thursday the owner came down to see the drawing and went quiet over it for a long time. Then he asked whether the name could be read from the far side of the harbour. Tobias said it could, if the light was right and the wind not in the eyes. The owner nodded, paid the half in coins, and went away up the hill without another word.

Tobias kept the sheet pinned above his bench afterwards, the thick strokes still faintly wet where he had not let them dry before he went on to the leaves.