Black and grey pen drawing of an ornate lettered banner design with flourished scrollwork, shown on paper beside two drawing pens.

Lettered banner design with flourishes

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A detailed pen drawing of a hand-lettered design with a ribbon banner, a diamond motif and decorative scrollwork. The lettering uses shaded, dimensional letterforms with fine hatching and stippling for depth. The design is in black and grey on white paper, with the drawing pens placed at the top left of the frame.

Lettering Lettering Banner Ribbon Flourish Scrollwork Diamond

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Lusk kept his best drawing pinned above the gold-leaf tins at the back of the shop on Chapel Street, where the light from the yard never quite reached. It was a banner of ribbon and scroll, every letter shaded so hard it seemed to stand off the paper, and he had worked on it through the winter of 1953 with two fine drawing pens and a magnifying glass he borrowed from the chemist. I swept up his shavings and watched him stipple the shadows one dot at a time, and once I asked him who it was for. He said it was for whoever had the patience.

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Mrs Hadley came in the first week of March wanting a sign for her bakery window. She wanted plain black capitals, the cheapest kind, and Lusk agreed, because plain capitals sell bread. But when he went through to the back for his brushes I took the banner down from its nail and carried it to the bench, and I lettered the bakery's name across the ribbon in gold, with the shadows picked out in the dark green of the Easter eggs in her window.

When it went up on the Saturday, the whole of Chapel Street stopped to look. Mrs Hadley stood on the step with flour on her cardigan and said nothing for a long while. Lusk came out wiping his hands, looked up at the sign, then at me, and pressed a sixpence into my palm. "Plain paint would have done the job," he said. "The shadow's the bit nobody sees, and they still know it's there." Then he went back inside, and I heard his pen tapping the drawing board, slow and even, as if he were starting another.