Black and grey lettering design of a globe wrapped in botanical sprigs, with the words Be the change you wish to see in the world.

Globe with lettering and botanical sprigs

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A stencil-style drawing of a globe on a stand, with a ring of leafy sprigs and flowers around the lettering. The quote Be the change you wish to see in the world is written in hand-lettered script across the globe, with the words in varied sizes. The linework is bold with speckled stipple shading on the base and sprigs, all in black ink on a plain grey background.

Lettering Botanical Globe Lettering Quote Botanical Leaves Sprig Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, you lot, the fire's only warm on this side. Brother Osric had the copying room at the top of the west stair, and in the winter of the great frost he was given a commission nobody else wanted: a globe of the world, the first the house had ever made, for the abbot's reading table. The abbot wanted the seas blue and the lands plain, and he wanted nothing written on it at all, because words, he said, belonged in books and not on the wide round earth.

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Osric made the globe anyway, in oak and gesso, and he turned it on its iron pin for three weeks while the snow piled against the shutters. When the abbot came to see it, he found the sea painted true and the continents sketched in brown ink, and across them, in a hand the abbot had never seen before, the words Be the change you wish to see in the world, curling from Europe to the Indies like a vine that had decided where it wanted to grow.

The abbot was furious. He ordered the lettering scraped away before the feast of the Annunciation. Osric said nothing. That night he went down to the herb beds under the wall, dug up the dead sage and the rosemary, and pressed their sprigs into wet clay until he had enough to ring the globe. In the morning the words stood up out of a wreath of green, and the abbot, who had come to scold, stood a long time with his hand on the stand. Then he said, "Leave it," and went down to his breakfast.