It´s not unusual nowadays to see tattoos with elfic writings, after the movie "The Lord of the Rings" brought under everyone´s eyes the intrinsic beauty of this language, and of its alphabet in particular.
The most reknown elfic alphabet is Tengwar, invented by J.R.R.Tolkien, and whose runes are the ones appearing inside the one ring, even if those words were not in elfic language, but in the Black Language of Mordor.
Tengwar is based on characters representing consonants, often paired, whereas vowels are mostly written as marks placed over or below the consonants.
Tengwar is used by many languages, among which Quenya, or High Elven, that is the elfic language, and Sindarin, mainly used by gnomes, which has three different ways of being written.
There are many styles of writing elfic characters, among which the Parmaite, which is probably the most elegant and that´s the one you´ll find in this post translated with roman letters.
You can find several articles on the internet that teach how to correctly write and speak elfic languages (such as
Omniglot), but it´s not an easy job.
Luckily, anyone can have his very own correct writing thanks to some dedicated websites, among which we point out the nice
online Tengwar translator: write your sentence, select the language you wrote the sentence in (between English, Elfic and few more unfortunately), and the desired output format. If you choose PNG the website will generate the writing as an image that you can eventually take to your favourite tattooist.
Here´s a sample of a sentence in Quenya:
"Elen síla lumenn´ omentielvo" = "a star shines on our meeting"
which becomes:
Want the hi-res alphabet? Here you go:
Tengwar elfic alphabet.
Have fun!
Mixed Styles