Black ink hand lettering on white reading IT IS well WITH MY soul, with tall capitals and flowing script words.

It is well with my soul lettering design

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

The image shows the phrase IT IS well WITH MY soul drawn in black ink on a white background. The outer words are in upright, evenly spaced capitals, while well and soul use an elegant, looping script with thick and thin strokes. The composition is centred and stacked over four lines, with plenty of white space around the text.

Lettering Lettering Script Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Halloran wanted the chapel board finished before the Whitsun visitors came down the front, and he wanted it plain. Capitals, he said, the sort a man can read from a bicycle. Ada Pryce chalked the guidelines on the varnished deal and said nothing, though she had already decided the middle of the line would not be plain at all.

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The order had come from Mrs Dunning, who had buried her son in March and wanted four words from the hymn painted under his name. She had stood in the shop with her gloves folded and asked for the words to lean, as if they were tired. Ada had her father's brushes, and her father had taught her that the words that carry the weight are the ones that get the long strokes.

So she painted IT IS in upright capitals, evenly spaced as the rules required. Then the well came, and she let the w bow low like a boat in a swell, the double l rising thin and tall toward the lamp. WITH MY went back to plain letters. For soul she lifted the brush and drew the s with a tail that swung down past the edge of the deal, the way the ferry rope used to hang off the quay at slack water.

Mrs Dunning came on the Friday and read it without speaking. Then she touched the trailing stroke, still tacky, and said that was where he would be, out past the harbour wall, and the rest of it could stay plain. Ada wiped her brush and did not tell her the tail had been an accident of the wrist. Some words, she thought, ought to be left a little unfinished.