Faith script lettering with flourishes
Lettering · Black and grey · Flash
A graphite pencil drawing of the word Faith in a flowing, calligraphic script with curling swashes extending from the letters. The linework is soft and slightly shaded, with the strokes thicker on the downstrokes and fine on the flourishes. The plain off-white paper background keeps the lettering as the sole focus of the composition.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
Dear Nell, you will laugh at me, but Master Hollis has finally let me letter the sign for the Swan at Coldharbour, and I did the whole word in pencil first, the way he taught me, before a single drop of gold touched the board. He calls the pencil stage the honest part. Anyone can make a brush look clever; the graphite shows whether the hand knows where it is going.
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The word he gave me was FAITH, and he would not let me make it plain. He said a plain word on a sign is a lie told in a hurry. So I curled the F until it looked like a fern unrolling, let the long stroke of the h dip below the line and come back up like a rope pulled taut, and I hung two little swashes off the ends so the eye would have somewhere to rest. The downstrokes I pressed hard; the hairlines I left so light you could almost miss them. Hollis looked at it for a long while and said nothing, which is his praise.
Then the innkeeper's wife came in with her boy, and she asked what it said, and the boy read it out slowly, sounding every letter, and when he got to the end he looked up at me as if I had made a bridge out of nothing. I have thought of that all week. Perhaps that is what a sign is for. Nobody needs the swashes to read the word. They are there for the moment a stranger stops and wonders what the hand was thinking.
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