Black and white photo of two hands with TRUE and LOVE lettering on the fingers and a shaded lion head with wings on the backs of the hands, a small child's hands resting on top.

TRUE and LOVE lettering across the knuckles

Lettering · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

Two hands are shown from above, with letters tattooed across the fingers that spell TRUE on the left and LOVE on the right. The backs of the hands carry a shaded design of a lion's head with wings, rendered with bold outlines and dense grey shading. The photograph is black and white, with a child's hands resting on top of the tattooed hands against a grey fabric background.

Lettering Traditional Hand Lettering Love Lion Wing 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

Dear Danny, Your mum says you've stopped answering the phone, so I'm putting this in the post the old way, with a stamp that cost me more than the sentiment deserves. The lion's finished. Mr Pargeter hung the board over the door of the Winged Lion on Tuesday, gold leaf catching the lamps, and the brewery man stood in the road with his hat off as if it were a funeral.

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You'll remember the wings were the trouble. Every draft I sketched came out like a hen that had lost an argument. Then I thought about your grandad's hands on the bellows, the way he'd spread his fingers flat to steady a glass before he blew it. So I gave the lion a face that had seen the weather and didn't mind, and I set the wings low, folded like a man's shoulders when he's carrying something heavy and won't say so.

Pargeter wanted words under it. I wanted the old ones, so I painted TRUE across the top in plain Roman capitals and LOVE beneath, the way your grandad lettered the bread van when we were kids. The pub's holding a wake for Clem on Friday. He drank there forty years, and he'd want it done properly, not with a laminated menu.

Come up at the weekend. Bring the good brushes, the ones in the tin with the cracked lid, and I'll show you where the gilding goes wrong if you lean on it. The left paw's still wet. Don't touch it.