Hand-drawn script lettering of the word blessed in black ink with thin blue flourishes on white paper, shown as a design sketch with no body placement.

Blessed script lettering design

Lettering · Mixed · Flash

A hand-drawn script word reading blessed, with the letters joined in a flowing cursive style. Bold black strokes form the letters while thin blue lines trace swashes and an looping flourish that extends above the final letters. The subject is centred on a plain white background with no body part or skin visible.

Lettering Script Lettering Flourish Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have flour still on your forearms when Mrs Okafor asks, for the third morning running, for the chalkboard by the door to be redone before the market opens. Outside, the street is slate grey and the ovens have been ticking for an hour, their trays warming like a kettle that will not quite sing. You pick up the pen and then set it down again, because the tin of ink nibs is on the shelf above the flour bins, and using anything cheaper for a word like this seems wrong.

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You start with the bold strokes, thick as a bread knife pressed flat, the tall b standing up like a man at a gate. Then comes the hairline, dragged from the foot of the first letter, running through the others and lifting at the end into one loose loop, the way steam leaves a cooling loaf when someone opens the back door too early. Mrs Okafor's son once said it looked like a kite string somebody had forgotten to let go of.

Halfway through the last a the nib catches and a blot spreads across the board. You hold your breath and stare at it. Then the first van driver of the day taps on the glass, reads the word through the window, and laughs at the loop as though it were a joke he had been waiting all week to hear. You wipe the blot with your thumb and leave the flourish exactly where it fell, because it looks, now, as if it was always going to finish there.