Three stacked panels of ornate hand-lettered design: a pen-and-ink sketch of the words Black Magic on paper, a blurred close-up of white and red outlined letters on black, and a close-up of

Black Magic ornate lettering design

Lettering · Mixed · Flash

The top panel shows a pencil and ink sketch of the words BLACK MAGIC with swirling flourishes, beside a black fineliner pen. The middle and bottom panels are close-up detail shots of the same kind of ornate lettering, with hatched shading, fine swirling linework and accents in red and blue on a black and white or grey ground.

Lettering Lettering Script Flourish Swirl Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Tomas the sign-painter came to the river crossing at Esk Weir in the autumn with a case of nibs, three brushes and a pot of lamp-black, and the toll-keeper, a thin woman named Ruth Cadell, asked him what he meant to paint on her gate.

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'Two words,' he said. 'The ones you need.'

She laughed, but she let him climb the ladder. He worked for a week. Every curl he drew had to end in a hook, and every hook had to be shaded with hatching so fine a child could not count the lines. When the words were done the gate read BLACK MAGIC in letters that seemed to lean against the wind, and the carters who passed under it stopped their horses and stared, then paid their toll without a quarrel.

Nobody could say afterwards what the lettering had done. Drovers said their dogs stopped barking at the water. A customs man from the far bank crossed without his papers, and came back the next day with them sewn into his coat, grinning and unable to say why. Ruth only noticed that the red and blue she had never ordered had started to show along the edges of the strokes, the way ink bleeds when it has been waiting a long time to be used.

On the last morning of the month Tomas took his brushes down and left the pot open on the step. Ruth found it full of ordinary paint, and a note in pencil: keep the flourishes tidy, and never let a stranger finish a letter for you.