Black ink script lettering design reading Wild Heart above Gypsy Soul, with a double-headed arrow between the lines, on a white background.

Wild Heart Gypsy Soul lettering design

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A line drawing of a lettering design with the words Wild Heart on the upper line and Gypsy Soul on the lower line, separated by a double-headed arrow with tick marks. The handwritten script uses loose, varied strokes with long tails on the letters. The design is in solid black ink on a plain white background with no shading or colour.

Lettering Arrow Script 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

Dear Tess, the Cutler's Yard board went up on Tuesday, and I will say the arrow came out better than I had any right to expect. Old Abney stood at the bottom of the ladder with his cap in his hands and read it three times before he said a word, which from him is a sonnet. You'll remember the brief: two lines of hand lettering, one above and one below, with a double-headed arrow between them so the yard could claim it belonged to the men who worked it and to the boats coming up the cut alike.

Keep reading

The top line was easy enough. Wild Heart went on in one long breath, the tails of the W and the d let trail off the edge of the board the way a hand does once it has stopped being careful. The bottom line fought me. I kept rewriting the tails of the Y and the y until the word looked like something a child might sign in a school register, and then I gave up on being neat and let the brush go where it wanted. Abney liked that better than anything I had done all month.

What I had not expected was the woman who came in with the sketch. She was not from the yard. She had a sheet of paper folded into eight, in a hand I took at first for a doctor's, and she asked whether the lower line could be copied from it. Her father wrote like that, she said, and he had kept a narrowboat until his knees gave out. I traced every loop and drag of those letters onto the board, and when she left she stood a long time at the foot of the ladder looking at the arrow, its ticks running out to either side. I still don't know which way she thought it was pointing home.