Pencil sketch of a lettering flash design with ribbon banners reading Life is Short, Break the Rules, Kiss Slowly and Love Truly, drawn on graph paper.

Lettering flash with banners and quotes

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A hand-drawn pencil design of stacked ribbon banners carrying script and capital lettering, including phrases such as Life is Short, Break the Rules, Kiss Slowly, Love Truly and Laugh Uncontrollably. The linework is clean and shaded in grey pencil, with some banners overlapping and a few small flourishes at the edges. The sketch is drawn on squared graph paper placed on a wooden surface, with the whole design filling the frame.

Lettering Lettering Banner Ribbon Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bakery bill came back from Mrs Pell marked paid, which means she liked the banners more than she minded the price, so I am writing you the rest of the list while the ink dries on the cellar door. You will not believe what she wanted on the window. Life is short across the top in my best script, then BREAK THE RULES in capitals underneath, because she said her late husband had never broken anything in forty years except the peace.

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I told her a sign ought to say what the shop sells, not what the customers should do. She said the bread would say that, and the queue would say the rest. So we sat on the step with a pot of tea and I drew the ribbons in pencil on squared paper, overlapping them the way a loaf folds over a tin. Kiss Slowly went in the middle, and she made me take out Love Truly and put it back twice. Laugh Uncontrollably I did with a little curl at the end of the L, which I still think is the best work I have done this year.

Then came the line she had been saving. NEVER, she said, and then the rest, and I asked her never what, and she gave me the look you give a boy who has missed the obvious. Regret anything that makes you smile. I wrote it small in the corner in a flourish like a kite string, and she cried a little and bought four currant buns for the lads off the boats.

When I came back in March the window was wet with sleet and the ribbons had run at the tails, the way true things do when they are left out in weather. Nobody had touched them. The pencil was still there under the paint, faint as a fingerprint, and I stood on the wet step grinning at it like a fool until Mrs Pell came out with two buns and asked what I was looking at.