Colour drawing of the words BE YOU, NOT THEM in ornate orange lettering, decorated with flowers, a mushroom, bluebirds, a skull and turtles, with red swirling linework.

Be you, not them lettering design

Lettering · Colour · Flash

The drawing shows the phrase BE YOU, NOT THEM in large decorative orange letters with gradient shading and outlines, set on a pale background. Red swirling linework frames the words, and small illustrations are woven into the letterforms, including a red flower, a red-capped mushroom, two bluebirds, a leafy sprig, a butterfly and a skull with a lightning bolt. Two cartoon turtles sit in the bottom left corner.

Lettering Botanical Lettering Flower Mushroom Skull Lightning bolt Butterfly Turtle Vine Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hattie Rowe had been painting shop signs in Little Hebble for thirty-one years, and she had never once let a customer pick her letters. So when Councillor Dunstan came in on a wet Tuesday asking for BE YOU, NOT THEM across the front of the new bakery, she set down her brush and asked him to say it again, slowly.

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"It's for the opening," he said, tapping the counter. "Something for the people who sneered at the planning." She sketched it on brown paper while he talked. As the letters took shape she gave the O in YOU a red flower the size of a thumbnail, because she had grown up on a farm where poppies came up through the wheat like warnings. She tucked a mushroom above the E, a sprig of green up the B, and two bluebirds perched on the Y and the U. Dunstan frowned at the birds. "Who asked for birds?" "Nobody," she said. "Birds don't ask."

He paid half up front and went off satisfied. She gilded the outlines over three days, and on the last afternoon she drew two small turtles in the bottom corner, painted so faintly that they seemed to be stepping out of the cream background. Dunstan came back at dusk, read the board from the pavement, and said nothing for a long while. Then he laughed, properly, the way she had never heard him laugh at a council meeting. "You've put a skull in the middle of it," he said. "Lightning through the eye." She had drawn it because the O in NOT needed something to look out at the street.

The bakery opened the next morning, and by noon the whole village had stopped to read the board and argue about the birds. Nobody noticed the turtles at first. Hattie noticed them, and noticed too that she could not remember deciding to paint them. She only remembered that her hand had kept moving all week without asking her, and that she had never once looked over her shoulder to see who the words were meant for.