Preview your tattoo lettering

Why lettering goes wrong more often than imagery

A misdrawn flower is still a flower. A misdrawn letter is a mistake anyone can read, and script tattoos are where the internet finds its cautionary examples. Two things cause most of them: fonts chosen at the wrong size, and text nobody proofread while it was still a stencil.

Seeing your actual words in a face — rather than the font name in a list — catches most of it. A capital that looked elegant in "Sample" can be unreadable in your grandmother’s name.

Choosing a face that will still read in twenty years

• Fine script needs size — Delicate connected scripts have hairline strokes. At a small size those thin strokes are the first thing to blur as ink settles, and a name can turn into a grey squiggle. If you want fine script, give it length.
• Weight survives — Slightly heavier strokes age better than very fine ones, because there is more line to lose before legibility goes. This is the single most useful trade-off to understand.
• Beware very ornate faces — Blackletter and heavily flourished scripts are beautiful and genuinely hard to read even when fresh. Gorgeous for a single word; punishing for a sentence.
• Letter spacing matters as much as the font — Cramped letters merge as they age. A little extra space between characters is cheap insurance.

Proofread it like it is permanent, because it is

Have at least two other people read the text before the stencil goes on — and if it is in a language you do not speak, have someone who actually speaks it read it. Translation errors and machine-translated phrases are among the most common permanent regrets in tattooing, and they are entirely avoidable.

Check the small things nobody checks: apostrophes in the right place, accented characters present and correct, dates in the format you meant, and roman numerals that actually add up. Read it backwards word by word — it is the oldest proofreading trick there is and it works because it stops your brain autocorrecting.

Fonts shown here are a preview to help you decide on a direction and a size. Your artist will hand-letter or redraw the final piece rather than trace a digital font exactly, and that is a good thing — hand-drawn lettering sits on the body better and can be adjusted to the curve of the placement.

Placement and how the words sit on the body

Text is a long, thin shape, which makes placement less forgiving than it is for imagery. Forearm, collarbone, ribs and spine all suit a line of words because they offer length. Curved placements — around a wrist or bicep — mean part of the phrase is always hidden from any single angle.

Ask to see the stencil in a mirror, standing up, before anything starts. Text that looks level while you are lying on the table can be noticeably crooked when you are upright, and a line of script a few degrees off is the sort of thing you will see every day forever.

Anything with a fixed length is worth double-checking

Dates, coordinates, song lyrics and quotations all have a correct form, which means they also have an incorrect one that is obvious to anyone who knows the original. Coordinates in particular: confirm the degrees, minutes and seconds against a map, and confirm the hemisphere. A sign error puts your meaningful place in the wrong ocean.