Small black script lettering reading Love with a tail swash, tattooed on the side of a finger in a Lettering style.

Script love lettering on a finger

Lettering · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a small black tattoo reading "Love" in flowing script, with a thin underline swash, on the side of a finger. The linework is solid and even, with the letters filled in dark ink and no visible shading. The ink is black against pale skin, and the soft, slightly warm framing puts the word at the centre of a dark background.

Lettering Hand Love Script Word

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 ink ran out somewhere south of the Horn, so Pascoe the bosun's mate did the lettering himself, a sailmaker's needle dipped in lamp soot while the Mary Ellen rolled under you like a drunk horse. You had asked for one word and nothing else. He wanted to add a little tail beneath it, a swash that would, he said, carry the word off the page if the sea ever took the rest of you.

Keep reading

Ada wrote back to Valparaíso on the squared paper she used for shopping lists. Her capitals leaned the way they always had, as if they were walking into a wind. She asked whether the word would fade, whether the salt would take it, and whether you had been brave enough to let Pascoe near you with a needle. You read her letter on the foredeck with the wind pulling at the corners, and you laughed until the mate asked if the sea had gone to your head.

When the ship finally tied up at Avonmouth, Ada was on the quay in a coat too thin for March. She did not look at your face first. She took your hand the way one takes hold of a rope on a wet deck, turned it over, and studied the small black word and its wandering tail. "The swash is crooked," she said. You told her Pascoe had been crying about his mother's cat at the time. She traced the line with her thumb, slowly, the way you would read a chart you already knew by heart, and said it did not look crooked to her at all.