Black hand-drawn lettering reading UNPREDICTABLE across the upper chest just below the collarbone.

Unpredictable lettering across the upper chest

Lettering · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of the single word UNPREDICTABLE tattooed in black ink across the upper chest, running slightly upward from left to right. The letters have a loose, hand-drawn lettering style with uneven baseline and mixed upper and lower case. The skin is pale and lit warmly from the right, with the word centred in the frame against a plain background.

Lettering Chest Word

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 board blew off the Pavilion roof in the Tuesday gale, and by eight the next morning Mr Hollis had me up the ladder with a tin of black enamel and a stick of chalk. 'Freehand,' he said. 'Like you're writing a note to somebody you half like.' The word was for the Saturday band, the Unpredictable Five, sent over in pencil with no spelling corrections.

Keep reading

I took it slowly. Each letter wanted to lean its own way, the N tipping against the P, the T sitting on its heel as if it had been told to wait. Hollis came round the ladder with his pipe unlit and said the trick was to let the baseline wander and then bring it back before anyone noticed. 'Make it look like a mistake that was meant,' he said. I have never been given better advice.

Freddie Marsh, the trumpeter, came by at noon to check the letters and stood under the ladder so long that I came down to ask whether he was all right. He said he had been told the same word his whole life, by a headmaster, a landlady, and a girl in Margate who married a bank clerk. Then he tapped the T with one finger, very gently, and said it was the only honest thing anyone had painted in the town.

That night the hall filled and the sign sat above the stage, slightly crooked, letters climbing toward the balcony as if they meant to get out. Someone had chalked a tally beneath it. When the lights went down and I was sweeping glitter off the floorboards, I looked up and saw the final E had worked loose from the line and hung there on its own, like the rest of us, waiting to see which way the music would go.