Pencil sketch of the words Family First in flowing script lettering on pale paper, shown on a wooden table beside an eraser and a pen.

Family First script lettering sketch

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of the words Family First, set in two lines of flowing, connected script with large looping capitals. The letters are shaded with soft grey graphite, giving them a slight dimensional effect against the paper. An eraser and a pen sit at the top left of the frame on a wooden table.

Lettering Family Script Lettering Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pencil had gone blunt by the time Arthur Pell pushed the sheet across the bench to you, and he tapped the place where the F of First had been rubbed back three times until the paper furred. Sign-writing, he said, was ten parts nerve and one part rubber. You could only ink a line once you had earned the right to be wrong on paper first.

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He had been asked to paint a board for the Coble Yard at Stathe, a family firm that had mended fishing boats on the same shingle since before the war. The widow wanted the words in the old copperplate her husband had admired, with loops big enough to hang a hat on. Arthur spent four evenings on the sketch while the tide came and went under the slipway, and you carried his tea down to him in a chipped mug each time, watching the capitals stretch further than sense allowed.

On the last night the widow came up from the yard with her son and stood over the drawing a long time without speaking. Then she asked him to leave the F as it was, the one that curled back on itself like a rope round a cleat, because her husband had signed every invoice with that same letter. Arthur said it would be the hardest stroke on the board. She said that was rather the point.

The sign went up over the door the following spring. You still remember the morning the gloss was dry enough to read, the grey pencil lines long buried beneath the paint, and Arthur standing beside you in the cold wind saying quietly that the best part of any job was the rubbing out.