Flash sheet of seven black calligraphic Chinese characters, each with an English word beneath it: dream, everlasting, good luck, happiness, harmonious, heart and journey.

Seven character flash designs with English meanings

Lettering · Mixed · Flash

A vertical flash sheet of seven large black calligraphic characters, each labelled beneath in a serif typeface with its English meaning. Each character sits on a cream background, separated by thin grey dividers, with a small red seal-style stamp beside it. The brush strokes are bold and uniform, and the layout is tidy and evenly spaced.

Lettering Character Dream Heart

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The raffle prizes were already stacked on the trestle table when Ruth found the box of old exercise books under the bar. Someone had scrawled Year 9 Calligraphy across one spine in marker, and the pages still smelt faintly of the pottery room, of wet ink and the turps Mr Pryce used to clean his brushes.

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She turned to the page without meaning to. Seven characters ran down it, each as tall as her hand had been at fifteen, each with its English word printed underneath in his careful capitals. Dream. Everlasting. Good Luck. Happiness. Harmonious. Heart. Journey. He had made them copy every stroke until the brush stopped wobbling, and he had let them stamp their names in red using halves of potato carved into squares. Ruth's stamp had come out lopsided, a little bruise of a thing, and she had been mortified.

Sunita arrived with two glasses of rosé and read over her shoulder. 'Oh God, the potato stamps,' she said. 'Mine said Sunnie for a whole term.' They laughed, and then Sunita tapped the bottom line. 'Journey was the only one he made us do twice. Remember? He said the last stroke had to be able to go somewhere.'

Ruth looked at her own seventh character, the one she had botched and rubbed out and redrawn so many times the paper had gone thin as skin. It still wouldn't sit straight. She tore the page along the spine, folded it into her coat pocket, and left the rest of the box for the raffle, the wine going warm on the table behind her.