Black ink drawing on white paper of the word HOME formed from wood grain lines, with a knot in the letter O, suited to a lettering design.

Word HOME drawn in wood grain with a knot

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

The image shows the word HOME, with each letter built from closely spaced black wood grain lines that curve around a large knot in the centre. The linework is fine and consistent, and the letters are defined by the empty white gaps between the grain lines. The drawing is in black ink on plain white paper and fills most of the frame.

Lettering Home Knot Lettering

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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

Shift your boots off that fender before they steam, the lot of you, and let the cold stay out there where it belongs. The pass is shut until the thaw, so you'll have the whole of this tale tonight, whether you want it or not.

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Back when this inn was only four walls and a rumour, a carpenter called Tobias Garrow split a single length of ash from the hill above Hallow Sike. The plank had a knot in its heart the size of a man's fist, and Tobias swore he'd plane it flat before it cost him a hinge. His daughter Nell, nine years old and sharper than her father's chisel, stood in the yard with her arms crossed and said the knot was the tree's eye, and it would keep watch if he let it be.

He let it be, mostly out of tiredness. That winter the snow came over the roof ridge and the road vanished, and one night a stranger knocked with frost in his beard and nothing else. Tobias had no bread to spare and no cause to turn him out. Nell took the man by the sleeve to the fire, and he laid his palm flat against the old back door and found the grain running around that knot like the rings of a pond. He said he had walked a long way looking for a door he could trust.

Nobody could say who first cut the word into the lintel above it, only that the letters followed the grain, so that from the yard you saw nothing but wood and from the inside you read HOME, plain as a lamp. Tobias never admitted to it. Nell did, when she was ninety and telling it to me across a table much like this one. The knot kept its promise, she said, and so did the people who stayed behind it. Now mind your cups, the snow isn't finished with us yet.