Black ink script lettering reading Perfectly Imperfect, with a ribbon banner under the word Imperfect, drawn as a lettering design on a white background.

Perfectly Imperfect script lettering design

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

The image shows the words Perfectly Imperfect in flowing, looped script with a large capital P, with IMPERFECT set in capitals on a curved ribbon banner beneath. The linework is solid black with a slightly textured finish and no shading. It is a single-colour design on a plain white background, centred with generous margins.

Lettering Script Banner Ribbon Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are nineteen and your hand shakes when you try to draw a straight line, so Mr Gallacher gives you the brushes nobody else wants. The fleet at Skerrow Quay has eleven boats, and every spring each one needs its name repainted once the salt has had its way with the old letters. He sets you on the transom of the Maud Ellery with a squirrel-hair brush and a tin of gloss the colour of wet slate, and tells you the letters must look as if they were written once, in one breath, by someone who meant them.

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You work all morning on the first word. The P loops too wide, and the e leans like a drunk against a bollard. Gallacher walks past with his pipe and says nothing, which is worse than shouting. By noon your forearm burns and the capital looks like a pair of ears. You stand back, furious, and the wind comes off the estuary and rocks the boat on her lines, and the whole name shivers in front of you.

Gallacher stops beside you. "Sea never lets a line sit still," he says. "Paint for the boat that's moving, not the drawing in your head." He shows you how to ease the banner under the words so it curves like a swell, and how a small wobble reads as a hand rather than a machine. The Ellery goes out at five. From the quay her name looks as though it was laid down on the water itself.

That evening you walk the shingle alone while the tide runs out and leaves her leaning on the mud. The paint is still tacky, and the ribbon has a faint kink where your wrist turned. You leave it alone. In the morning she puts out past the breakwater, and you watch the letters lift and dip on every swell, the banner bending with the water, and you decide you have never seen anything so right.