Pen and ink drawing of an ornate script lettering design with swirling flourishes on cream paper, beside a black fineliner pen.

Ornate script lettering design in ink

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A hand-drawn ink design of a single word in ornate, flowing script, with a large capital letter and looped flourishes surrounding the letters. The linework is fine and even, with hatched shading on some strokes and no colour. A black fineliner pen lies across the lower part of the cream paper, showing the scale of the drawing.

Lettering Fine line Script Lettering Flourish Scroll Pen

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Ellery brought the scrap of paper to my workshop on a Tuesday, folded small as a communion wafer. One word was pencilled on it and underlined twice: BREATHE. The boat was the Constance Ann, a tired green crabber out of Newlyn, and she wanted the name on the transom in gold leaf before the spring fleet went out. I told her I would need a fortnight. She said her husband had never once said a plain thing in his life, so I should give the word a flourish and let it show off a little.

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I started with the capital, a B that swelled like a wave lifting under a keel, then let the rest of the letters run into one another the way gulls follow a trawler. The R curled up into a loop, the E folded back on itself, and the final e trailed off into a tail as fine as a hair. I worked with a size-zero sable and a pot of gold size that smelled of warm pennies. When my back ached I stood at the harbour wall and watched the real boats come in, decks heaped with grey crab, and thought about how much of a word is simply the shape of the breath it takes to say it.

The fleet sailed on the Thursday. Ellery had died in February, of a chest that never cleared, and his widow did not come down to the quay. Her son did instead, a boy of about twelve in an oilskin three sizes too big, and he stood under the transom with his hands in his pockets while the crew hauled the first pots.

When the Constance Ann swung out past the breakwater, the sun caught the gold and the whole name flared on the water behind her. The boy read it out loud, slowly, a curl at a time, and by the last letter he had taken a long breath to finish it.