Black ink drawing on white paper of a stylised calligraphic lettering design with curling flourishes running diagonally across the sheet.

Calligraphic swirl design on paper

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A black ink drawing of a stylised, calligraphy-like design made of bold letterform strokes with curling flourishes at both ends. It is drawn on plain white paper, photographed at a slight angle with a shadowed edge along the bottom. The design is rendered in solid black ink with no shading or colour.

Lettering Calligraphy Flourish Swirl Script Design

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The band had stopped twice before Walter remembered he was meant to call the numbers, so I climbed onto the bandstand step with the chalk and wrote them up myself. My father taught me that. He sign-painted every shopfront on the front at Saltcombe until his wrist gave out, and he used to say a number on a board should look as if it had been pleased to be written.

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The dance cards were my job after that. I sat at the trestle by the cloakroom with a bottle of Indian ink and a nib worn soft from years of use, and I lettered each name with a tail that curled back on itself, so the girls could tell at a glance which boy had asked. Most of them thought it was fuss. Mrs Pargeter called it showing off, and she was right, though I never told her I did it on purpose.

Then a man in a grey coat came to the table, not local, and asked me to write his name. I wrote it slowly, a loop for the first letter and a flourish running off the edge of the card like a wave going out. He watched the ink dry, then asked me to dance the next waltz. I said I was on duty. He said the ink would keep.

I kept the card in my apron pocket all that night. Nobody came to claim it, and by the last tune the swirl had run clean off the margin where the name ran out of room, and I thought it was the best bit of lettering I had ever done.