Pencil drawing of the word Blessed in flowing shaded script lettering, decorated with curling flourishes, as a tattoo design with no body placement shown.

Blessed script lettering with swirls

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil sketch of the word Blessed in large, flowing script with heavy shading along the letter strokes. Curling swirls and scrolls extend above and below the lettering and at both ends, forming a decorative border. The drawing is in greyscale on a plain pale background, with no body or skin visible.

Lettering Script Lettering Swirl Flourish Scroll

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gate board came down on a Tuesday with its gilt gone to rust, and Mr Ellery stood in the yard turning his hat in his hands while I looked it over. 'Put it back the way it was,' he said. 'Only clean.' I told him I could do better than clean. He said his mother had ordered the old lettering from a man in Halifax in 1931, and she had insisted the word stay as she'd first seen it.

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I drew it first on the back of a feed sack, in pencil, because chalk wouldn't hold on damp wood. The B was the hard part. You start it high like a hook and bring the stroke down through itself, then the loops of the l and the double e's follow, each leaning the same way like people walking into wind. I shaded the downstrokes heavy so the letters seemed to carry weight. Then I gave the scrolls their curls at either end, little hooks that go nowhere and come back, because a sign without a flourish looks like a shop.

Mr Ellery watched me work for two days and said nothing until the Friday, when I was lining the final d. 'You've made it smaller than the old one,' he said. I said I'd made it the size the wood allowed. He went off to the vestry and came back with a tin. Inside were old gilt flakes, a page of his mother's sketch with the same scroll in faint ink, and a note in her hand: Keep the curl, it's the only part that moves.

I laid the gold leaf on the Saturday morning, breathing softly so it wouldn't lift. When the gate went back up, the swirls caught the early sun and seemed to turn over, the way they had on her paper. Mr Ellery stood under it a long while, then asked if I'd charge for the extra days. I said no, and he said that was the blessing. I took it for a joke until I got home and found he'd left the tin on my van seat.