Black script lettering reading My family my everything across the upper chest near the collarbone, in a Lettering style.

Script text reading My family my everything

Lettering · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

The image shows a two-line script phrase, My family my everything, tattooed across the upper chest close to the collarbone. The letters are drawn in smooth, flowing calligraphic linework with a single consistent stroke weight and only small variations in thickness. The ink is dark, almost black, against warm skin, and the framed artwork on the wall behind is softly out of focus.

Lettering Chest Text Script Family Word Phrase

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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

Brother Anselm taught me to hold the quill at the wrong angle first, so that I would learn to let the nib do the work. Forty years on, I still hear his voice when my wrist starts to tighten. The scriptorium at Hollin Abbey smelled of oak gall and wet wool, and in January the ink froze in the pot if the brazier was let go out.

Keep reading

The commission came from the parish of Saint Oswy, a fishing village on the Northumbrian coast, where a widow wanted a prayer copied onto a single leaf of vellum for her grandsons. She had sent only a scrap of paper with the words pencilled on it, and beneath them, in a hand that shook, the phrase she wanted: My family my everything. Anselm would have sent it back. Abbot Thomas said the Lord had given us a plain sentence and we must not dress it up.

So I wrote it plainly, in strokes that never lifted from the vellum, the descenders looping down like rope let out over a quay. I made the first line rise and the second line sink, so the eye would carry from one to the other the way a household carries a loss. When I finished the leaf had three blots on it, and I did not scrape them off.

The widow's boat came back to the abbey landing in March, and a boy of nine climbed the hill with the leaf folded inside his jacket. He could not read it, he told me, but he knew it said something good, because his nan had said so. I told him it did.