Black hand-lettered script reading Be you, bravely, set inside a looping wreath of leafy sprigs on a plain light background, shown as a tattoo design.

Be you, bravely lettering in a leafy wreath

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A black line drawing of the phrase Be you, bravely in flowing brush-style script, with the words split across two lines. A wreath of slender leaves and small dotted buds curves above and below the lettering, with sprigs ending in tapered tips. The design uses clean, even black outlines on a plain light grey background with no shading or colour.

Lettering Botanical Lettering Script Quote Wreath Leaves Sprig Bud

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The brush wants to lean left on the downstroke, Mae always said, and you let it, because a sign that fights its own hand looks like it's lying. I was halfway through the Lantern Café window when the dust came up off the Ostrow road and turned the whole street the colour of weak tea. I wiped the sable on my jeans and waited for it to settle, the way you wait for a horse to stop shying.

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Mae had asked for two lines, split where the breath would fall. She stood in the doorway with her arms folded and watched me lay out the leaves, a slender ring of them curving above the words and dropping low beneath, each sprig tapering to a point as if it were reaching for something past the glass. Her boy Tom had a bus ticket to the coast folded in his shirt pocket. She didn't mention it. She said her mother had hung a wreath on every door in the house, and she wanted the window to look like somebody had bothered.

I painted the first word without thinking. The second line I did slower, the loops of the b and the long tail of the y pulled out like thread off a spool. When I stood back I saw I had made the letters lean into each other, as if they were walking the same road. Mae didn't cry. She tapped the glass with one knuckle and said the little dotted buds were a nice touch, like rain just starting.

Tom left on Thursday. The sign stayed. Through the summer the afternoon sun came through the window and threw the wreath across the empty counter inside, and every morning Mae turned the stools so the shadow fell where the coffee cups used to sit. Be you, bravely, read the glass to anyone coming in off the highway. Every driver who slowed to read it was a stranger, and that seemed to suit her fine.