Black and grey flash design of a globe with a botanical sprig border and script lettering reading Be the change you hope to see in the world.

Globe with botanical lettering design

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A line drawing of a globe on a stand, with the script quote Be the change you hope to see in the world set across its face. Leafy sprigs and small dotted accents frame the lettering. The drawing uses bold, textured black linework with grey stippling and is centred on a plain white background.

Lettering Botanical Globe Lettering Script Quote Leaves Sprig

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell had the lettering half done when the wind came off the fens and tipped the ladder. She caught the rail with one hand and kept the brush in the other, a line of cream paint trailing down the globe's cracked belly like a spilt thought. Below her the Wheel of the World was already turning for the afternoon crowd, its painted continents blurred into one brown smear, and Mr Ansell was shouting for her to come down before she broke her neck on his property.

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The globe was old, a lattice of ash and tin ringed with brass, and the fair had dragged it from Boston to Skegness to Spalding for thirty summers without anyone reading what was painted across its face. Nell read it every night while the lamps came on. Be the change you hope to see in the world, in looping black script wrapped in sprigs of laurel, the work of a sign-writer who had died in a caravan fire in 1939. Ansell wanted it painted over with TRY YOUR LUCK in red capitals, louder and cheaper, and he had paid her in advance.

She did not refuse him. She waited until the last tent was struck and the lorries had gone grumbling down the A17, then she climbed up with a tin of black enamel and a finer brush. By lamplight she traced the old letters back out, murmuring each word as she went, and wound the leaves tight around the vowels so the fair's dust could not quite wear them away.

At dawn the globe stood alone on its stand in the empty field, dew beaded on the stippled oceans. Ansell came out with his tea, read the words slowly with his lips moving, and said nothing for a long while. Then he went back to the caravan and returned with a tin of red paint and a brush, and he set about touching up the leaves beside hers, one sprig at a time, until the sun came up gold over the stubble.