Pencil sketch of a cross made from black cursive lettering on paper, with soft grey shading beneath the letters, shown as a lettering design without a body placement.

Cursive script words arranged in a cross

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A hand-drawn cross is formed entirely from black cursive script on a pale sheet of paper. Soft grey pencil shading sits beneath the letters, giving them a slight lift and depth. The words follow the arms of the cross, with each line curving along its shape, and the composition is centred on the page.

Lettering Cross Script Lettering Handwriting

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pot of lentil broth had been sliding across the galley deck for a quarter hour before I thought to brace my knees against the range. Outside the porthole the North Sea was the colour of wet slate, and each time the bow dropped, the whole ship groaned like a man carrying too much. Dessie was in the lazarette bailing bilge water and swearing in Gaelic, so I was alone with the stove and the cards.

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The cards were Mrs Cathcart's doing. She had pressed a dozen of them into my hand on the Leith quay, each printed with a verse in her looping copperplate, and told me to read one whenever the sea got its teeth in. I had read none. Tucked behind the nutmeg tin, though, was the one she'd written for my father the year he went down off Cromarty. I took it out with greasy fingers and held it to the lamp.

Be still, and know. The letters wobbled as the deck tilted, but the line about the depth of every storm held steady enough. I thought of my father's hand on the back of my neck when I was small, steering me through a crowded market, and how he never once looked round to check I was following. So I stood still, my back to the range and my palms flat on the warm steel, and let the ship climb and fall beneath me until the pot stopped its skating.

When she came up level, I stirred the broth, ladled two bowls, and carried them down the ladder. Dessie looked up from the bilge, soaked to the elbows. 'Eat,' I said. 'The Lord's got the wheel.' He laughed, and for once I believed the second part, because the sea had given us a moment's grace and the broth was still hot.