Hand-drawn blue ink design of the word Faith in ornate script lettering with swirling flourishes on cream paper, beside a blue felt-tip pen.

Faith script lettering with flourishes

Lettering · Colour · Flash

The word Faith is drawn in flowing, ornate script in blue ink on cream paper. Thick and thin strokes create the letterforms, with fine hairline swirls and curls extending around the word. The composition is centred, with a blue felt-tip pen placed at the left edge of the frame.

Lettering Faith Script Lettering Flourish Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The banner had faded to the colour of weak tea, and Mr Vallance wanted the word back before the summer crowds came. 'Faith,' he said, pointing at the canvas over the ring as if I might have forgotten it. 'Make it hold the light like it used to.' I had brought my fine pens and a jar of blue ink, the same kind I used for wedding invitations in Leeds, and I spent three nights on a trestle table in the empty big top sketching the F first, because the F is where people look.

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The show had been shrinking for years. The lions went to a sanctuary in Wales, the trapeze rigging was sold for scrap, and the band was two accordions and a boy on a drum kit made from biscuit tins. Vallance's daughter, Nell, rode the one remaining grey mare at dusk and never once glanced up at the banner. I asked her why the word mattered. She said her grandmother had painted it, and that every flourish was a promise nobody had kept.

On the fourth night I drew the swirls last, the hairline curls that trail off the letters like smoke from a snuffed candle. My hand was steady for the first time in a month. The ink ran thick on the downstrokes and thin where I lifted, the way the old lettering books had taught me, long before the ring went cold. When I finished, the word sat on the paper with a small bloom of wet blue at the tail of the y.

Vallance stood under it a long time with his hat in his hands. Then he said the tent would stay up one more season, and he climbed the ladder himself to hang the new canvas, slow and careful, as though it might still come down on his head. Nell watched from the rigging. She did not clap. She just tucked the spare pen I had left behind into her boot.