Nine small white lettering designs in gold and dark brown script, mostly reading just drunk, with one reading drunk in love, arranged on a white surface.

Just drunk lettering designs in gold script

Lettering · Colour · Flash

Nine small white squares sit on a pale textured surface, each carrying a script phrase. Eight read just drunk and one reads drunk in love, all in flowing brush-style lettering with thick and thin strokes. Most of the lettering is metallic gold, with a few in dark brown or black, and the designs are spaced in a loose grid.

Lettering Text Phrase

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had shut the Coldharbour road by teatime, so Mrs Pell gave me the back bedroom and a pot of tea, and I spent the night at the kitchen table with my gilder's brushes and a tin of gold size. Nine squares of card were drying on the windowsill by the time the stove needed riddling. Eight said the same thing, because the Dunmore brothers had ordered eight just drunk boards for the bar, and one said drunk in love, because the younger brother had changed his mind at the last minute and wanted the word love in there somewhere.

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Gold leaf hates cold. It cracks at the edges if the room drops below the temperature of a bad argument, so every square had to wait its turn by the hearth while I worked the next. Mrs Pell's son Tom kept asking why a pub needed the same two words nine times. I told him a good sign is like a good hymn: you sing it until the room believes you. He said it was the first sensible thing I had said since the bus broke down.

By two in the morning the gold ran out on the eighth square. I had a half-pot of black enamel and a steady hand, so I lettered the last one in black, the loop of the d and the swoop under drunk thinner than the rest. Tom held the lamp and watched the strokes thicken and thin, and then said it looked like the word had been written by someone trying very hard to stay upright.

In the morning the road was cleared and the boards went down the hill in the back of the milk van. Mrs Pell kept the drunk in love one for herself and propped it against the teapot where the light fell across it. I never learned which brother got married, but I know which board the bride picked up first, and it was the one in black.