Black and white lettering flash sheet showing ten Paris metro station names in varied decorative script and block styles, with no body placement shown.

Paris metro station lettering sheet

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A flash sheet of ten Paris metro station names, each set in a different decorative lettering style, including ornate blackletter-influenced capitals, flowing script and swash forms. The linework is solid black on a plain white background, with some letters shaded by inline details and flourishes. The layout is a neat grid of five rows and two columns, with each name given equal space.

Lettering Lettering Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have been holding the brush like a bread knife for three weeks, Aurèle says, and he takes your wrist the way a priest lifts a chalice, turning it until the bristles lie flat. The workshop above the Rue de la Roquette smells of linseed and cold coffee. Outside, a tram bell rings twice and nobody looks up. On the bench sit ten stencils he has been cutting since spring, each in a different hand, and he wants you to learn every one before the city sends the enamel plates back for their new lines.

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Saint-Germain must swing loose, the S leaning over the G like a student who has had one glass too many at the Deux Magots. Belleville is squeezed tight and stacked, every letter elbowing the next for room, because that is how the street itself lives. Père Lachaise you paint as if the letters were cut into granite, serifs thin as frost, because the people who ride out there are in no hurry to arrive. When you ask why Barbès trails a tail beneath it, he says the trains come in from the north fast and hot, and the lettering has to look like it is leaving before it has landed.

He makes you wait until last for République. You are not ready, he says, and then he hands you the brush anyway. Write it like a crowd that will not sit down. You swash the R until its tail knocks against the é, and the stroke runs a little, and he grunts, which is the most praise he has ever given anyone.

He signs none of the plates. Under the square the first train of the morning rattles through the tunnels, and the wet letters shiver on the bench, each one shaped by the street it was made for.