Pencil sketch of three looping script lettering designs reading Big Sister, Middle Sister and Little Sister, each with small heart accents.

Big, middle and little sister script designs

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing on paper shows three connected script lettering designs, reading Big Sister, Middle Sister and Little Sister. Each phrase sits inside a long looping flourish that crosses over the word Sister, and small heart shapes mark the letters. The linework is fine and grey, with light shading, and the composition places the three designs in a staggered arrangement across the page.

Lettering Sister Script Heart Loop

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the kettle's on and the bread's still warm, so you'll hear this before the watch changes. Three sisters came aboard the Morwenna Gale at Falmouth in the spring of 1889, and they were the only passengers anyone could remember who never once asked for the captain. They had come to meet a father who had gone out to the Newfoundland banks two winters before and never written. Their names were Ada, Bess and Lil, and the ship's cook, a man called Pell with one good eye, swore that the eldest laid the table, the middle one argued with the tide tables, and the youngest ate the crusts off everybody's plates and never once got caught.

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Halfway across, the weather came down like a lid on a pot. Pell had the range roaring and the sisters crowded in beside it with their wet boots steaming. Ada, the big one, took a stub of pencil from her apron and began drawing on the back of a ration chit. She curled the word Sister in a long loop that swung back round on itself like a rope through a block, and she wrote Big at the start of the first one, then Middle, then Little, each in its own curl, so the three phrases tangled and parted and tangled again across the paper. She dotted every letter with a little heart, as if the ink needed reminding who it belonged to.

Pell asked what they were for. Bess said so no one could ever mistake whose sister was whose. Lil said it was so the sea couldn't steal any of them, because a sea that could read would have to stop and untangle them first. Ada only tapped the hearts and said nothing at all.

They found their father's grave in Placentia that autumn and stayed ashore, but Pell kept the chit. Years later a young cook asked him why the loops never closed. Pell only smiled and said that was the trick of it, that a loop which closes has nowhere left to go.