Black ink drawing of a skull built from hand-lettered quotation text on a cream background, a lettering design with no body placement shown.

Skull formed from hand-lettered text

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A skull outline is formed entirely from lines of handwritten black lettering, with the text following the curve of the cranium and the eye and nasal openings left blank. The linework is fine and even, with no shading, and the design is rendered in black on a cream or beige ground. The composition fills the frame, with the skull centred and the text running in lines across its top and body.

Lettering Skull Text Handwriting

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

Mrs Ruddock had copied the speech out by hand the winter the Playhouse lost its lighting rig, because the company's typewriter had jammed and nobody in Halifax would sell her a new ribbon. Eleven pages of Hamlet, in ink, on the backs of old box-office sheets. Now it was pinned to the bench in the prop room while she worked a pencil line round the cranium of the skull Oswin had carved from balsa and papier-mâché for the graveyard scene.

Keep reading

Oswin was not there to see it. He had gone south with the touring Lear in October and sent one postcard, of a pier, saying only that the sea was grey and he was eating properly. The skull had been his idea. He said a gravedigger's skull should look like it had been read to death, and so Ruddock had been filling the outline with the words, line after line, the letters tight at the brow where the thoughts piled up and loose at the cheekbones where an actor's thumb would rest.

She reached "the undiscovered country" and stopped, pen lifted, because the next line wanted to run into the eye socket and she had left the socket blank on purpose. Oswin had said to leave the eyes empty, always, or the audience would think the skull was looking at them. She set the nib down. Outside, the lamps in the yard came on one by one, and somewhere below the stage a bell rang for the half-hour. She finished the sentence on the far side of the hole, where the words could go round it like water round a stone, then signed the bottom corner with her initials, the way Oswin signed his drawings, and went home to bed.