Black ink pen drawing of a long cursive lettering line with swash tails on cream paper, a flash design for a lettering tattoo.

Cursive lettering line design on paper

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A long line of joined cursive lettering with a sweeping swash extending to each end, drawn in black ink on cream paper. The strokes are fine and even, with a slight variation in weight, and the letterforms are loosely connected. The image is a plain, evenly lit close-up with a dark border and no colour beyond the ink and paper.

Lettering Script Cursive Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, and mind the gull on the bench, he's had his eye on your crust since the bell. Now, you'll have heard about the Achterley brothers and the herring boat they called Wren. No? Then you've been hiding indoors like the Penhallow lad, and that's where the trouble starts.

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Old Jory Achterley ran the Wren out of Porthlowen for forty winters, and he had words painted across her transom in letters so fine you had to squint from the quay: Vivere vere est intrepidus. Nobody in town could read the half of it. Jory said it meant to live truly is to be unafraid, and his wife said it meant he'd bought the paint cheap from a Frenchman. Both were right, I suppose, the way wives and fishermen generally are.

The year the storm came off the Lizard, the younger brother Tam would not take the Wren past the breakwater. He stood on the steps with his hands in his oilskins and watched his brother's lantern bob out into the black. Jory came back at dawn with eleven boxes of fish and a split lip, and he did not say one word about courage. He just sat beside Tam on the steps until the sun came up over Gunwalloe and the gulls began their nonsense.

Next spring, Tam took the Wren out alone, and he came back in with salt on his face and the grin of a man who'd been let off a rope. Mind, I don't say he was braver. I say he finally asked himself what he was afraid of, and found it was only the quay.