It's never too late to live happily ever after

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

The design is a staggered quote set in flowing black script, with the words stepping down and across the page. The capital I, the H and the A of After have looping, swashed strokes, while the lowercase letters are smooth and even. It is solid black on white with no shading or colour.

Lettering Quote Script Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Pryce came into the shop at half nine on a wet Thursday, when I was already wiping size off my brushes, and set a folded envelope on the counter as if it might go off. Inside was a sheet of graph paper with a sentence written across it in pencil, the words stepping down the page like they were climbing out of a bath. It's never too late to live happily ever after. She wanted it on the front window of the bakery she had just bought on Kirkgate, beneath the old name, which she said she would not be keeping.

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I told her the glass would need a night to set and she told me she had waited seventy-one years and could wait till morning. So I stayed. I thinned the black enamel, laid out my mahl stick and my long quills, and took the first capital by the light of the street lamp outside, the way my father taught me, one stroke pulled in a single breath. The I curled back on itself like a fishing line, and the H swelled into a loop that wanted to be a heart. Mrs Pryce stood among the flour sacks with her coat still buttoned and watched every letter go on backwards, so I had to keep checking the pencil to be sure I hadn't got them wrong.

Around two the rain stopped, and a lad on a bike stopped too, read the window out loud and laughed in a way that was not unkind. Mrs Pryce laughed back. She said her husband had painted nothing in his life except the spare room, and that she had always wanted to be the sort of woman with a sentence on her shop. When I finished the A of After, its long tail sweeping under the word like a hand reaching for a rail, she pressed a coin into my palm that was warm from her pocket.

At eight the next morning I walked past with my flask and saw her at the counter, sliding the first tray of Eccles cakes into the case, reading the window from the pavement the right way round for the first time.