Hand-drawn ornate script lettering reading New York with fine line flourishes on white paper, sketched in progress with a pen.

New York ornate script lettering design

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A hand is sketching the words New York in an ornate, flowing script with swirling flourishes and curls around the letters. The linework is fine and dark, with thin strokes that vary in weight and the lettering is drawn at a slight diagonal across the page. The design is shown in black ink on cream paper, with the composition centred and the pen tip visible at the upper right.

Lettering Script Lettering Flourish Swirl Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The order came in on a Tuesday, pinned to a slip of carbon paper that smelled of the cheap pen the client had used. Two words, New York, and a note in capitals: MAKE IT LOOK LIKE IT HAS BEEN SINGING FOR A HUNDRED YEARS. Jonah had laughed at that, then gone to the drawer where he kept his brushes wrapped in chamois, because the man who wrote it was right about the look he wanted and wrong about everything else.

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He built the lettering from the bottom up, the way his old teacher had drilled into him in a basement off Commercial Road. The N came first, a tall thin stroke that leaned like someone walking into wind. Then the E and the W, which he let tangle into one another so the eye had to hunt for the join. The Y he gave a long tail that curled back under the Y and came up again as a tendril, and the tendrils multiplied until the whole word seemed to be climbing out of its own frame.

It took three evenings. On the last one the kettle boiled dry and he didn't notice until the smell reached the back room. He sat with the sheet under the lamp and saw that the flourishes on the left had grown heavier than those on the right, so the whole thing tipped like a boat taking on water. He thought about taking a fresh sheet. Instead he added one thin curl to the right, no thicker than a hair, and the balance settled. He signed nothing. The client never asked who had drawn it, and Jonah found that he preferred it that way.