Flash design of a teal block letter M with a teal sphere and black and blue scrollwork swirls on a white background.

Teal M letter with blue scrollwork

Lettering · Colour · Flash

A digital drawing of a solid teal block letter M with a shaded teal sphere above its left side. Black and blue scrollwork swirls and curls wrap around the letter and rise above and below it. The design is centred on a plain white background with soft grey drop shadows under the forms.

Lettering Scrollwork Swirl Sphere

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

The snow has pushed the coach a mile short of Thornhope, so the driver leaves you at the gate of the Mallard with your trunk and a lantern that smokes. Above the door a sign creaks on its chains: a square teal M, painted so thickly you can feel the brush strokes with your thumb, its corners softened by weather. Someone has hung a glass float the size of a fist from the left-hand chain, and the frost has crept over it in curls that look like the ironwork on a gate.

Keep reading

Inside, the landlady, Hester Quill, takes your coat without asking and sets it to steam by the range. She says her grandfather painted the sign for the carriers who used to stop here, and that the float came up in a fisherman's net off the Wend a hundred years ago. Nobody has ever managed to prise it loose from the house. You ask why nobody tried, and she laughs and says that is the question every guest asks on the first night and never on the second.

On the second night the wind drops and you wake to a silence so complete you can hear the float knock gently against the iron. You go down in your stockings. The M has slipped on one chain and hangs crooked above the step, and in the lamplight its shadow lies across the snow in the exact shape of the letter, as if the inn has been trying to spell its own name to the road all along. You put your hand on the cold teal paint and lift the sign back onto its hook, and the float stops swinging. Hester is already in the doorway with a cup of tea, and she does not ask what you have been doing out there.