Pencil sketch of the word Hope in flowing, looped script lettering on a sheet of paper, with a mechanical pencil resting at the top of the frame.

Hope in flowing script lettering sketch

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of the word Hope written in flowing, looped script with large swashes on the H and p. The linework is shaded with soft grey pencil, giving the letters some depth against the white paper. The image is composed straight on, with a mechanical pencil lying across the top edge.

Lettering Hope Word Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Aldous Penhale had painted shop fronts in Wexcombe for thirty-one years, and the only word he never lettered in gold was the one Mrs Harrow asked for in August, when the windfalls were rotting in the long grass of her orchard behind the chapel. She wanted it across the gate of the cider house, big enough to read from the lane.

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He pencilled it first, as he always did, on the back of an old ledger page. The H came easily, a loop like the hook for a bucket. The o he kept small, a bead on a string. The p he let run long, down under the line and back up again, because the descender needed somewhere to go. Mrs Harrow watched from the step with a bowl of plums in her lap and did not say whether she liked it.

It took him four days to lay the gold leaf. Wasps came to the size and the boy from the forge kept asking whether the word was for a wedding. On the last evening the sun came low through the trees and caught the swash of the H, and Penhale saw what the pencil had been hiding. You do not plant an orchard to see its fruit. You plant it in the cold, trusting the year will turn, and most of what you put in the ground never shows you anything at all.

In October a jar of the first cider came up the lane on a handcart. The label was handwritten in brown ink, and the H on it had been copied loop for loop from his ledger page, a little wobbly at the tail, as if she had practised it on the back of a plum crate until her hand was sure.