Black and grey flash sheet of numbered and lettered designs for the word The, shown in script, blackletter, block and ornamental styles, with no body placement.

Lettering sheet of the word The in many styles

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A flash sheet of about forty numbered and lettered variations of the word The, each drawn in a different typeface or hand. Styles range from thin script and flowing brushlike forms to bold blackletter, solid block capitals and ornate Victorian-style lettering with flourishes. The sheet is printed in black linework on a pale background, with a short instruction line at the bottom about stacking and aligning the designs.

Lettering Lettering Blackletter Script Flourish Ornament Serif Flash sheet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The first thing Mr Ambrose Tull taught me was that no word is ever just a word. He said it while I was bent over a sheet of cartridge paper in the back room of his shop on Gresham Lane, trying to make a capital T stand up straight without looking like a gallows. Forty versions of the same three letters lay drying around me. Some were thin as hair, some fat as a fist, one shaped like a broken fence. The Wednesday ledger sat open beside them with the rent owed in red.

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"Stop asking which one is right," he said. "Ask which one is hungry." I did not understand him for another year, not until a sailor came in off the Ellen Marr with a grandmother's name on his forearm, wanting it in blackletter so the fishwives would take him seriously. Tull drew it in ten minutes. It was the blackest thing I had ever seen, every stroke a little tower, and the sailor wept when he saw it, though he would not admit it afterwards.

I kept the sheet of forty. When Tull died in the autumn the landlord wanted the paper binned with the rest of the clutter, but I slid it into my coat and carried it out past the chandlers. On the quay I unrolled it against the wind and found that the word looked different now that I was alone with it. The script was loose and forgiving. The Victorian one had a flourish like a question mark. And the plain block one, number nine in the top row, stood there saying nothing at all, the way a man stands at a graveside when he has run out of things to say. I folded it back up and went to find a pen.