Script Tattoo Ideas and Cursive Lettering Styles

What a script tattoo means

Script is chosen because it looks written rather than printed. A word in joined writing reads as something said by one person to another, which is why the words on this page lean so heavily towards affection and devotion: amore, Beloved, soulmate, Hermosa, love you more. Set in capitals the same words would sound like announcements; in cursive they sound addressed.

The second appeal is continuity. A joined word is made in one movement with the pen barely lifting, so script suits words about things that do not break: forever, always, sempre. Several designs here make that literal, letting the last stroke of infinito run on into an infinity loop, or drawing the heart around soulmate out of the entry and exit strokes of the word itself.

Many of the words here are Spanish or Italian (mi vida, mariposa, Libertad, Hermosa, Bella, amore, sempre), and that is not an accident of the drawings. Chicano script grew up around Spanish words and family names, and a Romance-language word in cursive sits inside that tradition. For some wearers it is the family's language; for others a second language keeps a plain sentiment slightly private.

That privacy is real and growing. The Common Core standards adopted across most of the United States from 2010 left cursive out of the curriculum, and although several states have since put it back, a generation of readers finds joined writing slow going and ornate capitals close to unreadable. A script tattoo is partly private by default, which some people want and others only discover afterwards.

Everyday handwriting sits at the plain end of the category. The brave and love you more on this page are thin, slightly uneven joined writing with no flourishes at all, the kind copied from a note, and they express intimacy through the absence of display, where chicano and copperplate express it through ornament. Both are script, and they ask very different things of the artist.

Where the design comes from

Modern script descends from English roundhand, the pointed-pen writing of eighteenth-century clerks that George Bickham engraved for The Universal Penman in the 1730s and 1740s; because its models were printed from engraved copper, the style took the name copperplate. In the United States Platt Rogers Spencer developed a lighter, more ornamental hand in the mid-nineteenth century, and Frank Mason Robinson wrote the Coca-Cola name in Spencerian script in the 1880s. Austin Palmer's plainer method displaced Spencer's in American schools in the early twentieth century. Tattoo script took the flourished capitals of sign painters and then, in 1970s East Los Angeles, the fine single-needle line: Jack Rudy, who worked at Good Time Charlie's Tattooland, is widely credited with shaping the fine-line lettering that grew into what is now called chicano script.

Choosing yours

• Hairlines are where script is won or lost. In pen writing the contrast comes from pressure, thin on the way up and swelling on the way down; on skin the upstroke is a single fine line, and every line spreads by roughly the same small amount over the years. That spread barely registers on a heavy downstroke and transforms a hairline, so the contrast that made the word handsome flattens with age. A hairline laid slightly heavier than the reference keeps more of it, and one laid too fine may heal patchy and break.
• Joined letters sit closer together than printed ones, and the closed shapes go first: the eye of the e, the loops of l and b, the bowls of a and o. As they fill, e reads as an undotted i, rn becomes m and cl becomes d. Ask for the letters to be spaced a little more loosely than looks right on paper and for the loops to be drawn bigger than the reference, which is how a cursive word avoids closing up.
• A blowout is the risk that belongs to fine script. When the needle puts ink below the dermis it spreads sideways into the fat as a blue-grey haze along the line, usually visible within the first weeks, and it shows most on long thin strokes: an exit stroke or a swash under the word betrays it far more than a heavy capital does. Thin skin raises the risk, on the inner wrist, the inner upper arm, the top of the foot and the ribs. A blowout can be hidden by thickening or shadowing the letters, or lightened with a laser.
• Mind the slant. Copperplate leans at about 55 degrees from the baseline and most tattoo script leans with it, so on a limb the word should lean along the length of the arm or leg rather than against it. Set across a wrist, a steep slant can look as if the word is sliding off.

Common questions