Black lettering design reading believe in a serif face with dictionary pronunciation marks, a script line reading to have faith in, and square brackets, on a white background.

Believe dictionary-style lettering design

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

The design shows the word believe in a upright serif typeface, with a stress mark and a dot between the syllables as in a dictionary entry, enclosed in square brackets. Beneath it, the definition to have faith in is written in a thin, loose handwritten script. The linework is crisp and solid black on a plain white background, with no shading or colour.

Lettering Believe Faith Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Miss Ada Pellow had been correcting proofs since the spring, and by October her red pencil had worn a notch into the second finger. The slip came up from the composing room with a query in Mr Grice's cramped hand: the entry for believe had no definition yet, only a blank line where the stress mark should go. She sat at the long table under the skylight, read the word aloud twice to herself, and found she could not say what it asked of anyone.

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Her brother had written from Ypres the week before, three lines and a postscript about the mud. The postscript said he had stopped expecting the post to reach him and was writing anyway, in case it did. She had folded the letter into the dictionary at the M section and never taken it out. Now she took a fresh slip, set the pen to it, and wrote the brackets first, square and careful, the way the printers liked them.

The stress went on the first syllable, be, and the dot sat between be and lieve like a breath held before a fence. She wrote the definition in her loose hand, the one the office disliked because it sloped. To have faith in. She looked at those three words for a long time. They were smaller than the headword, and they were the only part of the entry that asked a reader to do something.

Mr Grice sent the proof back with one note in the margin: too personal for a reference work. Ada underlined it, then left the line as it was. Winter came. The letter from Ypres, when it finally arrived, was dated March and said nothing except that he was coming home on the Tuesday train. That evening she took the dictionary down from the shelf and turned to the entry, and the brackets still held the word steady.