Black handwritten script reading be brave, framed by green leaves and small orange, yellow and pink flowers, shown as a tattoo design on a white background.

Be brave script with flower wreath

Lettering · Mixed · Flash

A black brush-style script reads be brave at the centre of a wreath. Sprigs of green leaves arc above and below the lettering, with clusters of small orange, yellow and pink flowers. The lettering has bold, tapered strokes, and the foliage and flowers look painted in soft watercolour-like washes on a plain white background.

Lettering Botanical Script Lettering Flower Leaves Wreath

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sign had to be dry by the time the first lorry rolled onto Dunmere Green, so I painted it at four in the morning with a hurricane lamp hooked to the tailboard. My father's hands had gone too unsteady for fine work, so I did the lettering while he told me what the wire-walker, Odette Vance, would want. 'Plain words,' he said. 'She's frightened of the top rope and won't say so.'

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I did the words in black, thick on the down-strokes and thin where the brush lifted, the way he had taught me. Then I stood back and it looked like a shout in a church. So I mixed a wash of sap green and wiped a sprig either side, arcing like a laurel, and dabbed clusters of orange and rose and butter yellow between the leaves. The paint bled a little into the wet ground of the board, and the flowers came out soft as breath on a window.

Odette came out of her caravan with her hair still in pins and read the board twice. She did not thank me. She climbed the ladder into the rigging, and I watched from the ticket hatch as the crowd filed in under the lamps, the children pointing at the flowers before they noticed her at all.

When she stepped onto the wire that night, the drum roll stopped, and for a long moment she looked not at the drop but at the painted wreath above the tent flap, which I had hung low so she could see it from the ladder. Then she lifted one foot and walked. Afterwards there was a smear of rose on my cuff where I had touched the wet board, and I left it there.