Black ink calligraphic script in a Tengwar-style alphabet, with grey shaded vine flourishes, drawn as a tattoo design on a pale background.

Tengwar-style script with vine flourish

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A horizontal line of stylised letters in a Tengwar-like alphabet, written in black ink with thin, tapering strokes. Pale grey vine-like flourishes with small curls run along the line and between the letters, shaded with soft grey wash. The design is centred on a plain off-white background with no skin or body part visible.

Lettering Script Calligraphy Vine Flourish

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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

Every night the lamplighter of Harrowgate Quay walked the wet cobbles with his taper, and every night he stopped at the sign-painter's wall to read the words that had grown across it like damp. Nobody in the city could read them. The sign-painter had died owning a shop with no name, and the letters were long and looping, climbing between grey-washed vines that the rain never quite took away.

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His daughter Ilse, who had a head for shapes, said they looked like a fence of falling leaves. The lamplighter said they were a message, and a message wanted reading by someone awake long enough to see what it meant. So on the night the river rose to the third step of the fish market, he took his taper, a pot of ink and a stub of quill, and copied every stroke onto the back of a tide ledger.

It took him until the bells of St Brannoc struck four. When he held the copy up to the lamp, the strokes lifted off the paper and became a row of small brass keys, each one hung on a vine, and the vine ran off down the quay towards the water. Ilse swore afterwards she saw the last key drop into the river, and a door somewhere beneath the bridge swing open on its own.

The lamplighter never learnt what the words said. But the wall was clean the next morning, the rain having washed it bare, and he found the ledger folded in his coat with one line written beneath in his own hand: keep the lamps lit and the ferry will come for you.