Tattoo font generator

Size decides more than the font

The needle deposits pigment in the dermis, beneath an epidermis that replaces itself every few weeks, where immune cells called macrophages take the particles up. A 2018 study in mice, published in the Journal of Experimental Medicine, found that when those cells die, neighbouring cells take up the released pigment again, which is why a tattoo outlasts the cells that hold it. The lines still soften and widen over the years, and ultraviolet light, which breaks many pigments down, speeds the fading.

For lettering, that means the small gaps close before the strokes go: first the counter, the enclosed space inside an a, e or o, then the narrow gaps between letters. Artists generally keep about two millimetres of clear skin between strokes for that reason, which a face reduced to fit a wrist rarely has. Tattoo fonts compared sets out which families close up soonest.

A practical floor for letter height follows: around 5 mm for the lower case of a plain face, and nearer a centimetre for script, blackletter and anything with fine hairlines. The size control in the preview only changes the screen, so print the PNG at the size you intend and measure the smallest letter with a ruler.

Spacing is the part that ages

Type designers separate two kinds of spacing. Tracking is space added evenly across a whole word; kerning adjusts single pairs, such as AV or To, whose shapes leave a hole the eye reads as a gap. A digital font's spacing is set for paper and screens, where a line stays the width it was printed. On skin the strokes thicken, so a word set at a font's own spacing looks tighter each year, and lettering artists usually open the tracking before the stencil is made.

Monospaced faces are the exception. A typewriter gives every letter the same width, so an i sits in as much space as an m; the gaps look uneven, but they are wide, which is part of why typewriter lettering holds up at small sizes. Script is the opposite case. Its letters are joined by connecting strokes, and in copperplate-style hands those joins are the thinnest lines in the word.

Script, blackletter or serif

Copperplate, the model for most tattoo script, was written with a pointed, flexible nib that spreads under pressure, so downstrokes are thick and upstrokes are hairlines. That contrast is the look, and the hairlines are what fade first. Script suits names and one or two words set large along the forearm, ribs or collarbone. For a small piece a monoline script such as Sacramento, drawn with one stroke weight throughout, keeps more of its shape; script tattoos and name tattoos go further.

Blackletter is the family of broad-pen book hands used across medieval Europe. The upright, tightly packed textura style is the one Gutenberg's type imitated, and Old English is a type founders' trade name for it, not a link to the language. Its thick vertical strokes carry from a distance and give a word weight, which is why it is so often set large across the stomach, chest or upper back. The same density makes long phrases and small sizes hard to read.

Roman capitals descend from the letters of imperial inscriptions; Cinzel, one of the faces here, was inspired by first-century examples. Serif capitals and book faces have open counters and moderate contrast, so they suit dates, initials and short quotes. Roman numerals use only seven letters, I, V, X, L, C, D and M, which is why Roman numeral dates sit so well in a serif face.

Typewriter faces read as a private note, and hand-lettered faces as written rather than set, which suits a line in someone's own voice. Western and flash faces come from wood type and sign painting: the Tuscan letters of nineteenth-century posters, whose serifs split into points and curls, and the shadowed capitals that old flash sheets borrowed from the sign trade. Made to be read across a street, they want size and room on skin.

Taking the PNG to a studio

The download is the lettering alone on a transparent background. A word is drawn at a font size of at least 400 pixels, which at 300 dots per inch is about 3.4 cm, larger than most lettering is tattooed, so the file can be reduced to size without blurring. A long phrase is scaled down to fit an image 4,096 pixels wide.

Expect the artist to redraw it. A font is built to fit any word; tattoo lettering is drawn for one word on one part of the body, so an artist will usually thicken hairlines, open counters, loosen the spacing and bend the baseline to the curve it sits on. The file is a brief that settles the letterform and the spelling. The lettering designs show that redrawing, from numbers to memorial lines.

Every face here is published under the SIL Open Font License 1.1, which governs the font files; text set with them, an image of a word included, is not restricted by it, so the PNG can be printed and tattooed without asking anyone. The browser try-on places our own designs on a photo of your skin and does not accept an uploaded image, so it cannot show this lettering; the InkCraft app for iPhone has its own lettering tool that places a word on a photo of you.