Two stacked photos of black ink lettering tattoos in gothic-style letterforms on skin, the lower one reading love.

Two black lettering tattoos on skin

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

The image is two stacked close-up photographs of black ink lettering on skin. The top tattoo is a single word in angular gothic letterforms with small decorative flourishes, and the lower tattoo reads love in a similar style that can be read upside down. Both pieces use solid black fill with crisp edges, set against plain, lightly textured skin.

Lettering Other Lettering Word Love

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Pascoe taught me to paint a shopfront from the wrong side of the glass, so the gold leaf would read true to the street. He said the trick was to forget the word and think only of the shapes, the hooked stems and the little spurs that catch the lamplight like a stitch in a coat. I was fifteen and thought it was showing off.

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The job that came in that October was for the Tidewater Mangle on Dock Street. The widow wanted her husband's name over the door in black-letter, the old way, the way the almanacs were printed. I spent three nights on the mahl stick getting the first letter to lean out like a man who has seen a ghost. Pascoe came round with his lamp, looked for a long time, and said nothing, which from him was praise.

On the last evening the widow brought a second order, folded small and written in pencil on the back of a laundry docket. It was one word, LOVE, and she wanted it painted so that it could be read by anyone who turned it over in their head. I asked how that was done. Pascoe took the pencil, turned the paper half round, and drew the letters again, and there it was: the same word twice, once standing and once hanging from the hook.

She paid in shillings and never came back for the sign. I still have the docket, soft as cloth now. When I hang a board I turn it over in my head before I touch the brush.