Black linework design of the word LOVE in an elegant serif script, with the O looped into the flowing L and a curled flourish on the E, drawn on a plain white background.

Stylised LOVE lettering design

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

The design spells the word LOVE in high-contrast serif capitals, with the letters joined by sweeping curved strokes. The L's base loops into the O, and a thin, curling flourish rises from the top of the E. It is rendered in solid black ink and fine hairlines on a plain white background, with no shading.

Lettering Love Word Flourish

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lock-keeper's daughter at Hollin Bridge had a way of writing on the sides of the barges with a stick of wet chalk, and nobody on the canal could read her hand. Her father said it was the old Latin, or the bargemen's cant, and she let him think so. What she wrote was always one word, and always the same, slanted across the black hull like a rope pulled taut.

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The first barge she marked was the Constance, bound for the salt wharves, and the mate who had been courting the cook since Lent came up the towpath to find the word running from the stern to the bow in letters tall as a man's forearm. He could not read it. The cook could, and she would not say what it meant, only that the L had its foot curled under the O as if it were holding the O up, and that the flourish climbing off the final E was the piece that made it true. A barge that carried that word, she said, would never sink in a lock.

The mate painted the Constance twice before she sailed. He kept the chalk-line under the paint, where no one would see it, because his mother had taught him that a mark is only honest when you cannot scrub it off. Three winters later they were married at the top of the flight of locks, and the water ran high and quiet beneath them. The flourish on the E was still there, bright in the lamplight, curling up towards the sky like a question that had already been answered.