Close photo of a black script lettering tattoo with flourishes and a small stick figure on skin, in black and grey ink.

Script letters with a stick figure

Lettering · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows large looping script letters with a decorative flourish, joined to a simple stick figure with a round head and angular limbs. The linework is solid black with smooth, even edges and a few small areas of lighter ink. The design fills most of the frame against warm, slightly textured skin, with soft lighting and a plain background.

Lettering Script letter Stick figure Flourish Monogram

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

By the time you climbed the ladder on Tuesday, the old signwriter had already gone home with his bad hip, leaving the lettering half done on the shutter of Pemberton's Ironmongery. The client wanted a flourish curling under the P and the E, something to make the shop look like it had stood on Harbour Row since the Coronation. You had the long-handled brush, a pot of enamel gone thick in the cold, and his pencil outline, which was the finest draughtsmanship you had ever seen.

Keep reading

On the last stroke of the second loop you noticed a figure squeezed between the letters, no taller than your thumbnail. A round head, one arm raised as if hailing a bus, one leg kicking out toward the tail of the E. He had been painted with the same care as the capitals. In the corner, in pencil nobody would ever read unless they stood exactly where you were standing, were the initials J.H. and the year 1958. Mr Hollis had been your master for six years and had never once mentioned a joke.

You rang him that afternoon and asked. Hollis laughed down the line until he coughed. 'Every sign I did for forty years, I put one of him in. Nobody looked, that was the point. Leave him be.' So you did. You painted the flourish around the little man's raised hand, and when the enamel had set you could hardly tell where the brush had stopped and the joke had started.

On Saturday the shutter went up and a girl in a red coat stood on the pavement sounding out the name, letter by letter, stopping at the figure to point and shout. Her father told her to hurry. You watched her wave back at him, and you thought Hollis had got the one thing a sign-painter really wants, which was for somebody to notice.