Black and grey scroll tattoo with blackletter lettering of the Serenity Prayer across the skin.

Serenity Prayer scroll tattoo

Lettering · Black and grey · Photo

A scroll-shaped tattoo carries three blocks of blackletter text, reading the Serenity Prayer, on a parchment-style panel with curled ends. The lettering uses bold and fine strokes with shaded outlines, and the scroll is rendered in grey wash with light shading that gives it a worn, aged look. The design fills most of the frame against plain skin, with the text centred and easy to read.

Lettering Scroll

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

No, sit down, the eleven-forty is an hour late and it will stay late until the sun goes down, so you may as well hear this while you wait. Stand that lamp up, Dougie, it isn't going to walk off.

Keep reading

That was the year they took the sheds down at Carrow Junction. Old Ambrose Penhale had kept the level crossing for forty years, and he kept a scroll of parchment folded in his tin under the coal, a thing his mother had copied out by hand. Black letters, all curled up at the ends like a sleeping cat. Every morning he read it aloud to the gulls before he lifted the gate.

God grant me the serenity, it began, and Ambrose always stopped there, because the rest was the trouble. Courage to change the things I can. A man can manage courage on a wet morning. Wisdom was the hard one. Know the difference, the scroll said, and Ambrose never did know the difference, not between a goods train that could be waved through and one with a cracked axle under it.

The night the excursion stock ran off the points, he didn't stand at the gate at all. He ran down the line with the lamp in one hand and the parchment crumpled in the other, and he didn't stop to read a word of it. Some of it you keep in your head, he said after, and some of it you have to put down and run with.

They still hang the scroll in the waiting room now, behind glass, its corners worn soft as cloth. Mind you don't touch it. Right, there's your train, and it's on time, which is more than I can say for the rest of the world.