Tattoo Fonts: Lettering Styles That Stay Legible

What a lettering tattoo means

Choosing a typeface is choosing a tone of voice before anyone has read the word. Strength in heavy blackletter sounds like a charter or a newspaper masthead; the same word in small lower-case typewriter type sounds like a note left for yourself; in sign-painter capitals with a drop shadow it sounds like a shop front. Most people pick the word first and the letterform second, and are then surprised by how much the second decision changes the first.

Words are chosen over pictures for their exactness. A rose can mean love, grief or nothing in particular, and people read it however they like; HOPE means hope. That literalness is the whole appeal for someone who wants no room for misreading, and it is also the cost, because a word has no second reading to retreat into on the days it feels too plain.

Most letterforms arrive with a borrowed setting, and the setting is part of what they say. Blackletter carries churches, diplomas, the Chicano lettering of Los Angeles and the logos of heavy metal bands. Uncial carries Ireland, which is why Anam Cara, Irish for soul friend, is set in it here. Stencil capitals carry military crates and survival; typewriter type carries letters, diaries and the act of writing; fat interlocking graffiti capitals carry the New York subway cars on which that style was worked out.

Everyday handwriting is the one letterform chosen for its lack of design. The small, slightly uneven enough and breathe on this page are meant to look unperformed, as if written in passing, and they are harder to draw than they look: an artist who smooths every wobble out of them turns them back into a font.

Colour and ornament shift the register again. GOOD VIBES in rounded 1970s capitals shaded from pink to orange, or Courage in flat red, yellow, blue and green behind a black drop shadow, is decorative before it is verbal. Lettering like that is seen as a picture first and read as a word second, which suits a cheerful word and undercuts a serious one.

Where the design comes from

Nearly every letterform used in tattooing is older than Western tattooing itself. Roman capitals descend from inscriptions such as the one on the base of Trajan's Column, cut in Rome in 113, which Carol Twombly redrew as the Trajan typeface for Adobe in 1989. Uncial is a late Roman book hand that Irish scribes took up and adapted; the Book of Kells, made around 800, is written in its insular descendant. Blackletter is the letter Gutenberg cast for his Bible in the 1450s, and much German printing stayed in it until 1941, when a decree issued by Martin Bormann ordered it replaced. Copperplate comes from eighteenth-century English writing masters, typewriter type from office machines (Howard Kettler drew Courier for IBM in 1955) and stencil capitals from shipping and the army. For most of the twentieth century tattooists lettered all of them by hand, which is why old tattoo lettering has a family likeness that no digital font reproduces.

Choosing yours

• The part of a letter that fails first is the hole in it. The enclosed space inside an a, e or o is called the counter, and it is where spreading ink goes, so faces with small, tight counters (blackletter, condensed gothic capitals, heavy brush strokes) close up first, while open round faces such as Roman serif, clean sans and typewriter type keep their shape longest.
• Size to the smallest letter, not to the word. A reasonable floor is about 5 mm for the lower-case letters of a plain sans or typewriter face, and nearer a centimetre for blackletter, script and engraved letters, whose strokes are heavy relative to the gaps between them. Below that the word still reads on the day and drifts towards a grey bar over the following years.
• Blackletter has a reading problem of its own. Its i, m, n and u are all built from the same short upright stroke, so a word full of them turns into a picket fence; medieval scribes added the dot over the i for exactly that reason. Words such as Strength and LOYALTY suit it, and a word like minimum or unanimous does not.
• Letter spacing is the last decision and the one most often skipped. Letters that nearly touch on the stencil will touch in ten years, so spacing that looks slightly generous on paper is usually right on skin, and the wide tracking of the FREE on this page is as much a practical choice as a fashionable one.

Common questions