Bold black hand-lettered word Smile in a flowing script style, drawn with marker on a cream background, shown as a tattoo design.

Smile hand lettering in black ink

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

The image shows the word Smile drawn in a bold, flowing hand-lettered script, with thick black outlines and inner highlight strokes that give the letters a dimensional look. The lettering is set on a plain cream background with soft shading toward the edges. It reads as a design drawing rather than a photograph of skin.

Lettering Smile Lettering Script Word

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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 gatehouse of Harrowgate Keep had lost its letters long before I got the job, so when Mrs Dunning rang the hire line she only said, "The sign says nothing now, love, and the coaches keep stopping to ask what it used to be." I drove up the single-track road on a Tuesday with a pot of black enamel, two sable brushes and a tin of gold leaf I had no intention of using. The wind came off the moor as if it had a grudge against the whole county.

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The word had gone up in 1957, according to the trust's ledger, painted by a man my father once called the best hand north of the Tyne and the worst company. Dad had taught me that a letter is only a shape until you give it weight. Lifting the old board off its iron hooks, I found the paint blistered into a grey skin, and beneath it the ghost of the original: a big looping S that dropped below the baseline as if it were sliding down a banister.

I spent three days on it. I outlined every stroke twice, the way Dad always did, then went back with a fine liner and cut the highlights along the inside curves so the letters seemed to lift off the board. On the third afternoon Mrs Dunning brought up a flask and stood reading over my shoulder. "Your father did that m exactly," she said. "He told me once that a grin is only a row of hills if you draw the bottom of them heavy."

When I climbed down the ladder the light had gone copper over the battlements. I wiped my hands on a rag and watched the wind try the board, and it held. People would stop their coaches and read the word and laugh at the joke, and none of them would know that the man who first painted it had been a miserable sod who had never once smiled at my father.