Black handwritten script lettering on a white background, reading a quote about ink and breath, styled as a lettering design.

Handwritten script quote about ink and breath

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A black script quote is written across several lines on a plain white background, reading "I read like the ink from the book is oxygen and I'm gasping for breath", with "- unknown" beneath it. The thin, flowing linework is uniform and has no shading. The lines are staggered in a diagonal, with the final word set towards the right.

Lettering Quote Script Ink Book

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bookbinder's girl, Maud, had been stitching signatures since the thaw, and by the time the banns were read at St Hild's she had sewn the whole of the Harrow family Bible twice over. Her intended, a carter named Tobias Rudd, could not read a word of it, and said so plainly at the church gate, which pleased her more than any gift.

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On the morning of the wedding the vestry door stuck, and nobody could say why. Nobody had told Maud that the book on the lectern had been locked away since Lent, because the ink had gone thick and grey with damp and the vicar would not let it near the altar. She went in with her awl still in her apron pocket and found the Bible open on the vestry table, its pages fanned like gills.

She sat down beside it. She had never read a whole psalm aloud in her life, only the labels on her father's jars, but she bent her face to the page and began, one word at a time. As her breath went into the words the grey ink lifted and went black, letter by letter, as though something had been fed. By the time Tobias came looking for her with his hat in his hands, she had read the marriage psalm through twice and was gasping like a swimmer.

When the vicar came in he found the bride on the floor, the book open across her knees. The fen people still say the ink needs a breath to wake it, and that is why they stand the bride at the lectern and make her speak the vows aloud before any man slides a ring onto her finger.