Close-up photo of a small black script tattoo of the letters D and A on skin, with fine body hair visible around it.

Small black script initials on skin

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A small tattoo of two cursive letters, a D and an A, joined by a flowing stroke, sits on a patch of pale skin. The linework is black, with a fairly even, slightly bold line and little visible shading. The tight crop centres the lettering, with the surrounding skin and sparse hair filling the frame.

Lettering Other Initial Script Letter

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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

The master tells you the letters must never be lifted from the wax. He has you draw the D with your stylus, a round belly and a tall stem, then send the point down and across in one unbroken pull to meet the A. "A letter that stops for breath is a letter that lies," he says, and taps the tablet where your last attempt has a gap the width of a barley grain.

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You practise until your shoulders ache. The wax in the shop off the Forum smells of resin and the sour wine the carters bring up from the river. Each evening he holds your tablets to the lamp and scrapes out the failures with the flat end of the stylus, so that by the Kalends your pair of letters has been written and erased more times than you can count. He makes you write them over and over and never says whose they are.

On the last morning he sets a fresh tablet in front of you and leaves the room. The D comes easily now. The join, the long sweep up into the A, runs clean as a river under a bridge, and you feel the stylus stop of its own accord at the top of the crossbar. When he returns he does not lift the tablet to the light. He only nods, and presses a small bronze seal into the wax beside your letters, the same two initials cut backwards, so they will print true on every scroll you seal from now on.