Two pencil sketches of ornate lettering designs, one reading HOPE and one reading FAITH, with flourishes around each word.

Hope and Faith lettering sketches

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

Two pencil drawings stacked vertically show tattoo lettering designs. The top sketch spells HOPE and the lower one spells FAITH, both in heavy, angular letterforms with decorative swashes and inner shading. The drawings are in grey graphite on a pale background, with clean outlines and soft pencil shading.

Lettering Hope Faith Lettering Script Flourish

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada Preece had lettered boats in Porthcadan for thirty-one years and could tell a bad hand from the far end of the slipway by how the paint sat. The order on her bench that Tuesday was two words for a new crabber, drawn in pencil by its owner, Eli Kerrow, on the back of a tide table. He had pressed so hard that the lines ghosted through the paper. HOPE was to go on the port bow and FAITH on the starboard, and he wanted them read together when the boat came in on the flood.

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Ada spent the morning on the first word. The letters were heavy and angular, the H cut like a gate, and the flourishes curled off the top like spray caught in a wind. She laid the shading in with a sable brush and a tin of black enamel, working the inside of each stroke so the letters looked lit from one side. Her mother had taught her that shadow was only light that had decided to wait. Eli hung about the bench with a flask and said nothing, which she took as approval.

Halfway through FAITH, his daughter Nell came down the slipway with a thermos and asked whether the A was meant to lean on the I. Ada said it was, because the pencil said so, and Nell laughed and said her father drew everything to lean on something else. Ada kept the cramped letters exactly as he had drawn them, though she was tempted to open them up a little. Eli would have noticed, and Nell would have told him she'd seen it done.

The boat went down the slip on the afternoon flood, the paint still tacky along the bow. Ada watched from the harbour wall as it swung in the swell, and for a moment HOPE and FAITH lifted into view together, the water doing the last of the work.