Black blackletter script reading We the People tattooed along the inner forearm of a person wearing a white top, with a checked shirt and bookshelves in the background.

We the People lettering on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo is the words We the People written in bold blackletter script across the forearm, running slightly upward from left to right. The letters have heavy black strokes with sharp, angular serifs and some decorative flourishes on the capitals. The ink is solid black on light skin, and the photo is taken at a slight angle with a plain background of shelves and a checked shirt.

Lettering Forearm Blackletter Script Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dorothy Vane had the brush loaded and the chalk line snapped before the band finished tuning, and still the W kept leaning like a man who had been at the cider. Up on the ladder above the Grange stage, she worked the blackletter the way her father had taught her: heavy downstrokes first, hairlines last, the serifs cut sharp as broken glass. Below her the floor was already chalked for the Harvest Ball, and somebody's boy was dragging trestle tables into rows.

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The committee wanted the words over the stage, We the People, in old letters, because the Ladies' Circle had been given the Fourth dance as a civic affair and the chairman thought Gothic type sounded like the Declaration. Dorothy didn't argue. She thought about the men who had written the thing in a room with no fire, quill in one hand and patience in the other, and she gave the capital W a flourish the chairman would never notice.

Halfway through the P, a fiddler wandered up the steps to watch and asked whether she meant to paint the people in or leave them out. She told him the people were the ones who would be dancing underneath, and the lettering only had to hold them up. He laughed, but she kept the brush steady. By the time the lamps were lit the words stood black above the boards, and the room filled with couples turning under them.

At midnight the chairman climbed up to inspect the work, squinted at the line and said it was fine, though the last e looked hurried. Dorothy admitted it was. The fiddler had struck up again and she had wanted to be on the floor. She wiped her hands, slid down the ladder, and walked into the dance beneath her own words, where nobody asked her to pay for the paint.