Black ink line drawing of the word beautiful in flowing handwritten script, with a long sweeping stroke over the top, shown as a tattoo design on white.

Handwritten script reading beautiful

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

The image shows the word beautiful written in a looping, handwritten script in black ink on a plain white background. The ascenders and descenders are long and extended, and a single curved stroke runs across the top of the letters. The design is in fine, even linework with no shading or colour, and the word fills the centre of the frame.

Lettering Script Handwriting Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Walter Penhallow had painted shop fronts in Millbrook for forty years, and in all that time he had never been asked for a word that was not the name of a shop or a price. So when Margery Tull came in out of the rain with a sixpence folded inside her glove and asked for just one word, he set down his squirrel-hair brush and waited.

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"Beautiful," she said. "In the long hand, the one your father used on the lifeboat board." He knew the hand. The f and the l were the difficulty, because they wanted to drop below the line like a fishing cord over a gunwale, and every apprentice he had ever taken on tried to shorten them. Walter did not. He mixed lamp black with turpentine, snapped a chalk line for the baseline, and let the loops run the way his father had taught him, with one hairline stroke sweeping over the top as if to hold the word down against the wind.

It took him three days, working on the inside of the glass so the paint would survive the weather. Margery came each evening and stood at the counter with her hands in her apron, not asking whose name the word was for. On the last afternoon she told him it was for the girl who swept the step, who had been told all her life that she was plain. Walter thought about that for a while, then wrote the f so its tail dipped under the sill and the l reached up toward the gutter.

The next morning the sun came through the glass and threw the letters across the cobbles, backwards and enormous. The girl stopped with her broom and read them from the shadow. She could not read them the right way round, but she stood there anyway, following the long tails with her eyes, until the baker shouted for her to get on.