Styling Helvetica for Tattoo?

TinyCrumb16 February 2010 · 10:02

A co-worker of mine is getting a tattoo this week. Her name is "Tiffany" and she's looking to get just the world "beautiful" on her arm. She's really liking the absence of style that Helvetica provides. However, she'd really like to style the "tif" part in the word a bit different as it's part of her name.

We played around with a few ideas, such as making it light, but nothing really felt right because it sits in the middle of the word and seems to break up the consistency that Helvetica provides in the first place.

Anyone have any good recommendations on how to style that part of the word different in such a way that still looks great? Or maybe any examples of signs/posters where they've done something similar that has looked great?

yusufcana17 February 2010 · 10:23

tattoo in helvetica :) awesome!

you can try making it a little bit blurry, but I don't know if it's possible with tattoo.

theplatypus17 February 2010 · 14:07

try organic lines?

Craig Eliason17 February 2010 · 14:11

Why not a different color (of a similar value)?

yusufcana17 February 2010 · 20:19

you can try something like this

http://www.dirtymouse.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/si_scott.jpg

Penn Glendinning18 February 2010 · 08:19

Color is the best suggestion to maintain the integrity and cleanness of helvetica and still accomplish what you want.

mickmeg25 February 2010 · 09:26

i don't like so much color tattoos, especially in this case: in the middle of the word, any other color (e.g. red) in my opinion breaks the optical weight of the word making it seems two words spaced. i like underlines and in my opinion in this case this works well, it retains the absence of style (as you said, even if i think there's more style here than in many other tattoos) you loved.

mickmeg25 February 2010 · 09:25

sorry for the wrong image size i'm new here ^_^

K Cerulean Pease27 February 2010 · 10:45

I think it might work if you take the bottom of "tif" and pull it down to descender length.

Brock French27 February 2010 · 14:27

How about "vanitiffany"...

binaryskeletons25 March 2010 · 14:34

http://i204.photobucket.com/albums/bb315/fenderQT/beautiful.jpg

obviously, you could use something a little prettier for the cursive part, but you get the idea.
(sorry for the link, i don't know how to post images yet)

Dave Rowland Sc...26 March 2010 · 10:11

how about putting a tail on the f that mirrors the bottom of the t? This would give the tif part a symmetry that might be enough to set it apart from the rest of the word without breaking it up too much.

Dave Rowland Sc...26 March 2010 · 13:13

Hmmm, that looked better in my head than it actually does

Brock French28 March 2010 · 12:28

Still waiting for the photos on this one...

Pablo Impallari2 April 2010 · 13:27

Why not using Haas Unica

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