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Arabic calligraphers call "Diwani" a kind of lettering that looks like Celtic or Tribal tattoos.
Of course, the Celts had nothing to do with it (and neither did the Tribes). Actually, it is the newest of the six main styles of Arabci calligraphy and was developed only recently, in the Ottoman Empire, during the reign of Süleyman I "the Magnificent".
You already saw Celtic Arabic, oops, I mean Diwani Arabic, in most of the samples in my page Mirror Compositions . Normal "newspaper-style" Arabic doesn't work well for mirrors, because the letters sit on a horizontal line. Diwani style letters are more flexible.
Of course, there's no need to make a mirror. We can write a word just once in this style. This is "Aisha":
The interesting thing about diwani is that we can tie two words around each other, like this:
(click the image to see how these words look in everyday Arabic).
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| hulm wahid (seven letters) | "Jose Luis" and "Olvido" (15 letters) |
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| "andré 1998" and "sara 2004" (nine letters, plus the small numbers) | "wolf" (five letters) |
Prices:
"Tied" diwani, trying to give the letters the shape you tell me, and making crossings: 50 euros up to 10 letters.
Each additional letter 2 euro, but for tattoos, less than 12 letters is best.
Small tattoos have few letters, and when the letters are few, only very simple shapes work, like the triangle in the "wolf" above, or the two triangles in the "andre sara", or a drop shape. Quite unfortunately, a heart shape won't work unless it is upside down. I am often asked to put words into the shape of an elephant, a lion, a praying man, or a bird, but most of the time these things look good on paper but take up too much space on skin.
Another simple shape is the armband. Around a big arm, one can place abour 36 Arabic letters. If somebody wants the name of their daughter made into an armband, most English names have four, five, six Arabic letters, and simply repeating the name would result in a boring design. So in the page armband, to make the designs more interesting, I repeat the name in two series, one normal and one upside down, and make sure that the tails of one copy cross through the next copy. But a "my name and my spouse's" tattoo usually has two names that add up to about 12 letters, and there is no need to repeat the names upside down.
A'ishatattoos in ArabicCan you translate into Elvish?
Copyright (c) 2003-2008
Jordi Mas Trullenque.
email: jordimastrullenque at gmail dot com
http://purl.oclc.org/net/tatus/diwani.en.html
Last revised: 2008-06-01