Hand-drawn lettering design reading Never give up in ornate script with flourishes, sketched in pencil on paper beside a pencil.

Never give up lettering design

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of the words Never give up in ornate, stacked script with looping swirls and extended flourishes. The letters have shaded strokes that suggest a tattoo lettering design. The design is drawn in grey pencil on pale paper, with a red pencil lying at the upper right.

Lettering Lettering Script Word Swirl Flourishes

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The brush has stiffened in the cold by the time you reach the final flourish, so you breathe on the bristles and keep going. Below the refuge the Hennock Pass folds down into cloud, and the snow has already taken the marker posts one by one. Your board leans against the lee wall, its ground painted the colour of old brass, and the letters are meant for whoever comes grinding up in the morning, if anyone does.

Keep reading

Tomas taught you to pencil everything first. Grey lines on pale card, the loops left loose until the shape felt right, a red pencil tucked behind your ear for corrections. "The swirl is the promise," he used to say, tapping the paper with his thumbnail, "the letters are only the road." You thought him soft then. You had not yet watched him climb a ladder in a gale to finish a sign for a mill that had already shut its gates.

At half past four the wind drops and a single pair of lamps noses up through the cloud. A lorry, chains ringing on the bends, slows where the ice is worst. You watch its driver squint at the refuge wall, then at the board, then at the road ahead, which is no clearer than it was an hour ago. He does not stop. He lifts one hand from the wheel as the lamps sweep across, and for a moment the three words stand out of the dark, bright enough to read from the road.