Black and grey lettering design reading Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future, in a shaded and outlined traditional-style typeface on a beige background.

Every saint has a past lettering design

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

The image shows a typographic design set on a plain beige background, with the text Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future in capital letters. The top two lines use a shaded, engraved-style typeface with hatched gradients, while the lower lines are outlined with decorative inline details and a script word between them. The design is entirely black linework and shading with no colour ink, and it is centred with generous space around the text.

Lettering Traditional Lettering Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Hollis paid me in brown ale and a half-crown for the pair of signs, and asked for the top two lines shaded, the way the old engravers did on the bank's brass plates. I had never cut a shadow into a letter before. I spent three nights at the bench in the back of the print shop on Quay Street with a steel nib and a jar of Indian ink, hatching each stroke so the S looked lit from the left by one lamp.

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The lower lines were for the chapel noticeboard across the road, and Reverend Dyer wanted them plain and outlined, nothing to tempt a child into thinking the words were worth stealing. I told him the sinner would be the one reading them. He laughed the way men laugh before they have been caught out. The script word between the lines I wrote in the joined hand my mother taught me at the kitchen table, before she went to Cardiff for work and sent postcards that grew shorter every year.

On the Saturday the sign went up, Tom Keable came in off the tide with a canvas bag over one shoulder and a face like a shut shop. He stood in front of the window for a long time. Then he asked whether a man could be a saint and a sinner at once, and I told him I had never met a man who was only one. He bought a pint of mild and asked me to add a fourth line in small capitals with his name on it.

I did it that evening under the lamp over the bench, because the ink had to dry overnight. I left a gap beneath his name, a clean strip of beige, as though the rest of the line had not been decided yet. Then I swept the shavings into the bin, turned the key on the shop door, and walked home along the harbour wall with the lamps coming on one by one.