Ink drawing of an ornate lettering design with curling leaf flourishes and dot shading, drawn on cream paper beside a fine liner pen.

Ornate lettering sketch with flourishes

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A black ink drawing of two stylised letterforms, with the strokes filled in heavily in places and finished with curling leaf-like flourishes and scrollwork. Fine line work and stippled dot shading add depth to the thick and thin strokes. The design is shown in black ink on cream paper, with a fine liner pen lying diagonally across the lower right of the frame.

Lettering Lettering Letter Flourishes Leaves Scrollwork Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fleet is in by four, and by six the quay smells of diesel and bait. You sit on an upturned fish box with the fine liner your daughter gave you at Christmas and a drawing pinned under a stone. Hal Trewin wants his initials on the wheelhouse, but he wants them to grow leaves, the way the church doors in Newlyn do. You make the first stroke thick, then let it thin out to a hair, the way a brush used to go before anyone sold ink in tubes.

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By mid-morning the gulls have given up on you. The shadows are the hard part. You stipple them with the tip of the pen, one dot after another, and you keep your breath slow, because a shaking hand leaves a freckle where a shadow should lie. Trewin comes back at noon with a bruised thumb and watches over your shoulder. He asks whether the letters will still read after a winter of salt. You tell him the curls are what keep the weather off. Leaves turn water, and the scroll holds the rest.

He goes quiet, then says the boat was his mother's name before it was his, and the big letter is hers. He does not say more and you do not ask. You go back to the stem of the first leaf and add a small one beside it for every season she went out on the trawlers, which he counts out loud on his fingers until he runs out of hand and laughs.

On Monday the boat clears the harbour wall at five. You stand on the quay with the pen in your pocket and watch the wheelhouse catch the first light. The letters look heavier than they did on paper, and the leaves are moving a little in the wind off the water. The pen has run dry, so you shake it twice and press it to your palm until the ink comes.