Black ink hand-lettered design reading never stop exploring, with a ribbon banner, shaded letterforms and swirling flourishes, drawn on white paper.

Never stop exploring lettering design

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A hand-drawn lettering design in black ink on white paper, reading NEVER STOP above a large shaded EXPLORING. The words sit on a curled ribbon banner and the large letters have hatched shading along one side, with decorative scrolls and curls around the edges. A bold swash loops beneath the word, and a ruler along the bottom edge shows the scale of the drawing.

Lettering Lettering Banner Flourish Scroll

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ribbon was the hard part, Tobias said, because a ribbon has to look as though it is turning over on itself, and paint would rather lie flat. He made me draw the banner three times on squared paper before he let me near the board. Ruler along the bottom edge, always, so the letters stayed honest. 'Scale tells the truth,' he said, tapping the green line with his pencil stub.

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The job was a new sign for the helter-skelter at the end of the pier, and the words were his own, scrawled on the back of a tide table: NEVER STOP EXPLORING. I asked him who it was meant for. He said it was for whoever climbed the steps, and that he had stopped exploring the summer his wife went to Lisbon without him and he stayed behind to mind the shop. He didn't say it bitterly. He hatched the shadow of the big E in fine lines, forty strokes to a letter, while the gulls argued over chips below us.

The sign went up in August, the swash under EXPLORING sweeping out like a river mouth. A girl from the café photographed it and asked who had painted it. By then Tobias was on the coach to his sister's in Cromer with a one-way ticket he had bought in July and never mentioned. In his drawer I found the squared paper, the three crossed-out attempts, and a fourth drawing I had never seen, with a small rowing boat tucked inside the loop of the G.

I left the boat unpainted. Some evenings I climb the helter-skelter, one step at a time, and look down at the words from the top, where the ribbon seems to turn over and the letters stand up straight for once.