Five black brush lettering designs on a white background, reading Visualize and Believe, Faith, Different, Can you sense and Take action, in a lettering style.

Five lettering designs on a white background

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

The image shows five separate black lettering designs stacked vertically on a plain white background. The words are drawn in bold brush and calligraphic strokes, with some pieces using looped, flowing letterforms and others using sharper, blackletter-like angles. The designs are rendered in solid black ink with no shading or colour, and each sits in its own space down the page.

Lettering Believe Faith Script Calligraphy

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The board for the Plough had gone up crooked, so Mr Tilly sent me out with a scraper and a tin of size before the rain came. I was seventeen and apprenticed to him at the edge of Ashdown Wood, where the last cottages gave way to oaks, and nobody in the parish would pay for a sign that leaned.

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He taught me the hand first. Flat brush for the stems, sable for the hairlines, and a rule he repeated until I dreamed it: never sign a thing you haven't stood back from. On Fridays he wrote phrases on scraps of deal and made me copy them until my wrists ached. Visualize and believe, he'd say, and when I asked what I was meant to picture, he told me to paint the first letter and find out.

That autumn a widow from the mill cottages commissioned five small boards for her garden gate, each lettered in a different hand, and she paid in advance with coins still warm from her apron. Faith went on the first, looped and tall. Different on the second, in a loose running script that leaned like wind through barley. Can you sense on the third, in the black angular letters Tilly kept for funerals. Take action on the fourth, dry-brushed so hard the grain showed through. I asked what the fifth should say. She said she would know it when she saw it.

The fifth board never came back to the shop. Tilly took the rest up the lane on a handcart, and when I followed with the last tin, I found her standing at the gate with the blank board in her hands, nothing on it but a single pale stroke where my first brush had rested. She turned it over and said somebody had already been and gone, and she hadn't needed to ask them anything.