Flourished script lettering reading All that glisters is not gold, with a smaller line beneath, shown as a black and grey design with no body placement.

All that glisters is not gold lettering

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A calligraphic lettering design with the words All that glisters is not gold in large flowing script, plus a smaller line reading Often have you heard that told. Swashes and sweeping hairline strokes surround the letters, with grey gradient shading that gives the lines a metallic, silvery look. The text is arranged in a centred, stacked composition on a plain white background.

Lettering Lettering Script Quote Calligraphy Flourish Swash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Abernethy swore the watch was eighteen carat, and the woman across the counter swore it had come down from a duke, so between them I was to write a figure in the book before the kettle boiled. I turned the case over under the lamp. It sat in my palm too lightly for gold and too brightly for brass, and the hinge had the faint sheen of something dipped more than once.

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Mr Abernethy's own trade was gilding. Thirty years he had laid leaf on picture frames, saints' halos and the lettering over the door, and he knew every way a surface could lie about itself. He taught me to test with a fine file, one nick at the rim where nobody would look. Under the yellow lacquer the metal showed white as a fish's belly. Silver, glazed over, and not even good glaze.

I didn't say so. He had taught me that the cruellest thing you can do to a shining object is announce it. Instead I weighed the watch on the brass scale, wrote silver in my neatest hand, and offered her exactly what the metal was worth. She studied the figure for a long time. Then she laughed, short and surprised, and said her grandmother had told her the very same thing about her husband.

That evening I climbed the ladder with a pot of size and a gold leaf brush and touched up the sign over the door, the one that read Abernethy, Gilder and Pawnbroker. The letters caught the streetlamp and flared. For the first time it seemed to me less a promise than a warning, and I left it shining anyway.