Arabic and English "to the moon and back" script
Lettering · Black and grey · Flash
The image shows two lines of text on a plain white background: Arabic script above and the English phrase "to the moon and back" below, both in black. The Arabic is set in a flowing naskh-style typeface with bold strokes, while the English uses a lighter serif. The text is centred with generous white space around it, and no body part or skin is visible.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
You have been lettering the rides for nineteen years, and the fair has never asked you for anything shorter than a sentence. This morning the grass is still white with frost and the Big Wheel lies folded in its trucks, while you work on a stepladder with a size brush, laying gold leaf along the last curve of a gondola panel that nobody will read until dusk.
Keep reading
The commission came from Yusuf Haddad, who runs the dodgems and has a daughter in Leeds who wants both lines to match, so she can read them aloud to her grandmother. He had written them on the back of a fuel receipt at a services near Doncaster: إلى القمر والعودة, and underneath, to the moon and back. You asked him twice which way the Arabic should face. He laughed and said the moon never minded which way round you put it, only that you came back.
By seven the wheel is up and turning, and you climb into the top gondola with a flask of tea to check your work against the sky. The car park glows below. Children queue at the gate with coins in their fists, and not one of them looks up at the panel. The gold catches the last of the light, and from up here the words stand upright against the dark, read by nobody except the one person who asked for them.
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