Handwritting Recognition moving from character level to word level
I do not think that you would need a recurrent neural net here. This will be much slower to train than a ConvNet. Additionally, your data is images, correct? I think you could use a deep convolutional net to a fully-connected net. This should be fast and perform well. Please look at the following archived blogs from keras.
Building powerful image classification models using very little data
How convolutional neural networks see the world