Pencil sketch of an ornate swash design with shaded ribbon-like forms and curling scrolls, drawn on off-white paper.

Pencil sketch of an ornate scroll flourish

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A greyscale pencil sketch of an ornate, looping flourish that resembles a stylised letter, built from shaded ribbon-like forms and curling scrolls. Soft hatching gives the shapes volume, with darker outlines on the lower and right-hand edges. Faint construction lines and a ghosted sketch on the right edge suggest the design was still in progress.

Lettering Flourish Scroll Swash Letter Ribbon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Edie had redrawn the capital B four times before Mr Okafor's father came in from the harbour to see how it was coming along. The shop sign for the Pearl and Anchor chandlery had to be lettered by Saturday, and the old board, salt-blistered and peeling, still bore the name of a man who had died in 1958. She pinned the tracing paper flat with two brass weights and tilted the lamp so the pencil would catch the grain.

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The trouble was the ribbon. A proper swash wanted the stroke to lift and turn back on itself like a wave rising off a sea wall, and every time she shaded the lower loop it sat flat as slate. Her uncle used to say a letter ought to look as if it could be unrolled. She had thought that was nonsense until she tried to rub out a curl and found the paper had already remembered it.

On the Friday the other sketch turned up. Beneath the drawing she had abandoned in the spring, faint as breath on a window, was an earlier version: the same loops but wider, sitting on the right of the page where the sea light fell. It was her uncle's hand, unmistakably, with his habit of ending every flourish in a tight spiral like a fiddlehead fern. She traced it with her fingernail and laughed out loud.

She kept his lines and drew her own over the top, so the board would carry both of them. When Mr Okafor came by on Saturday to see it hung, he stood a long time in the street with his hands in his coat pockets, then said the B looked as though it had been waiting for someone to pick it up.