Pencil sketch of the words John 3:16 in flowing script lettering on squared graph paper, drawn as a tattoo design with no body placement shown.

John 3:16 script lettering sketch

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of the words John 3:16 in ornate script, with a large looping capital J and swashes extending beneath the letters. The linework is shaded lightly in grey graphite, with the numerals 3:16 written in a matching flourished style. The design sits on graph paper with a plain, uncropped composition.

Lettering Script Lettering Numeral Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Maud, the ship has stopped rolling so badly that I can write this without the ink jumping off the page, so you must forgive the slant of my hand, which has been trying to keep pace with the ocean for a month. Mr Ashdown, the purser, has taken to calling me the penman, because I wrote out the manifest for the whole second class in a copperplate he said looked like it had been bred for a church door. I told him my schoolmaster in Deptford made us practise capitals until our wrists ached, and that the trick was never to hurry the loops.

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Last Sunday the captain asked me to letter a board for the saloon, a verse for the sailors who could not read it in the Bible on the shelf. I chose the one about the Son and the world, and I wrote it with a soft pencil on squared paper first, because a man must be sure before he spends the good ink. The J gave me the most trouble. I made its tail sweep down beneath the line like a rope paying out, and then I looped the figures of the numerals so the three and the sixteen seemed to be shaking hands across the gap. Ashdown stood behind me and said nothing for a full minute, which from him is praise.

They hung the board above the stove. This morning a boy from the stokehold stood under it with his mouth moving over the letters, and when I asked what he was reading he said, plain as weather, that it was the only thing on the ship he could work out by himself. I have never been so pleased by a pencil. Write to me at Cape Town, care of the post office, and tell me whether the chrysanthemums came up.

Your loving brother, Edwin.