Close photograph of black blackletter lettering tattooed vertically along the side of a person's ribs, with a dark wall and records in the background.

Vertical blackletter lettering on the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows a large tattoo of pointed, blackletter-style lettering running vertically up the side of the torso, over the ribs. The letters are filled in solid black with smooth, sharp edges and decorative flourishes on several strokes. The ink is the only colour, and the photo is taken at a slight angle with a plain wall and a few framed items behind.

Lettering Ribs Lettering Blackletter Word Script

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 brush had to be loaded just so, Mr Fairley said, or the pointed strokes would sag into ordinary letters. I was nineteen and had been grinding black paint for six weeks before he let me touch a board. That Tuesday he set a plank of ash across the trestles behind the chandlery in Whitstable and told me to letter the transom of the Mary Ellen, a crabber whose owner wanted her name in the old spiked capitals, all hooks and tails.

Keep reading

I had the name down by dinner time, but I had also gone on up the plank with the same black, stacking a second word above the first so that it climbed the grain. Fairley came out wiping his hands and read it the way signwriters read, from the foot upwards. BELIEVE at the bottom, DREAM above it, the flourishes on the D curling back like a fishhook. "Ted didn't order that," he said. "It's the same ink," I told him. "Same price." He laughed, which I had never heard him do before.

Ted Hollis came round at four, red in the face, and stood with his arms folded in front of the board for a long time. Then he asked what it cost to take the second word off. Fairley said the price was the same either way, and that a boat carries what the men aboard have in their heads whether the paint admits it or not. Ted grumbled, paid, and had us fix the transom that week.

The Mary Ellen went out at first light in October and came back through a squall with her name still bright and the dream hanging over it. Fairley never painted it out. The board stayed on his wall for years, flaking at the edges, and I still see it when I shut my eyes to load a brush.