Black script lettering reading No Pain No Gain with decorative flourishes, drawn as a tattoo design on a white background.

No pain no gain script lettering

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

The design reads No Pain No Gain in flowing black script, with the word Pain set large across the upper half and Gain below it. Thick and thin strokes with pointed swashes and curling flourishes frame the words, and a long horizontal stroke separates the two lines. The image is a clean black line drawing on white with no shading or colour.

Lettering Script Flourish Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mae had sat under the gutter at Saltergate market since before the bells, lettering names onto tin for anyone who paid a penny. The rain came sideways off the fish stalls and ran into her ink pot, so she kept it under her coat and worked with the brush held close to her chest. A man in a wet cap wanted his mother's name in a curl, and she gave it to him, and he went off whistling.

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The next to come was a boy of perhaps twelve, carrying a crate of eels he had been paid to lift and was not strong enough to lift. He stood over her table dripping and asked for words that would make his arms grow. Mae told him she sold only what was on the board, and the board said nothing about arms. He asked what the board did say. She turned it round. It was the old phrase her father had painted under the eaves of the shop before the flood took the shop, and she had never bothered to change it.

"That one's free," she said. "You've paid for it already, every morning you carry that crate."

He looked at the eels, then at the letters, sounding them out with his lips. He asked her to write it on his hand, and she did, in the thin hairline she kept for christenings. The rain washed half of it off before he reached the harbour.

Years later, so the stallholders say, a woman came asking for the girl with the brush, and was told the girl had gone up the hill to the sign works. Nobody could say what the woman wanted. Only the eel boy, grown broad and grey at the temples, swore he had never once let the letters wash out.