Black and white lettering design reading Harley-Davidson with a B and D emblem, a ribbon banner and ornate spires, drawn as a flash design with no body placement shown.

Harley-Davidson lettering with ribbon and emblem

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A black and white drawing of the words Harley-Davidson in bold, flourished lettering, with a circular B and D emblem on the left. A curled ribbon banner sits beneath the text, and ornamental spires extend above and below the design. The linework is solid black with white highlights and no shading or colour.

Lettering Lettering Emblem Ribbon Banner Spire Scroll

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tank was still tacky when Ada Pryce finished the second S, and Dennis from the garage was already leaning in the doorway, wiping his hands on a rag that had seen better decades. 'Leave the spires off,' he said. 'Nobody in Sheffield wants ornaments on a machine that does sixty.' Ada didn't look up. She had spent four years at her father's sign shop learning that a letter is only as honest as its thinnest stroke, and she was not going to let a man with oil under his nails tell her where a flourish should stop.

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The ribbon was the hard part. It had to curl under the name so it looked like it was holding the weight rather than hanging off it. She drew it four times on the back of a Co-op receipt before Dennis's brother rode the bike up the cobbles, black as a boot and dented on the left side in the shape of a thumb. Joe had bought it off a widow in Hathersage who wanted the lettering kept, every curl of it, because her husband had painted it himself in 1951 and she could not bear to see it go to a stranger.

Ada worked through the afternoon with the window open and the smell of thinners drifting out over the yard. When she reached the highlight she took the finest sable she owned and laid one white line along the top of the banner, the way her father had taught her, so the eye knows where the light sits. Then she stepped back and found the spires had crept into the picture after all, two black points reaching for the sky like they had always belonged there.

Joe came back the next morning to collect it. He ran his thumb along the ribbon and didn't say anything for a long while. Then he counted out the money in coins, every one of them warm from his pocket, and left her the receipt with the sketches still on it.