Black ink handwritten script on a white background reading Progress NOT Perfection, a lettering design with no body placement shown.

Progress not perfection handwritten lettering

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

The image shows the words Progress, NOT and Perfection written in flowing, handwritten black script on a plain white background. The letterforms have varied stroke weights, with thicker opening strokes on the P and long connecting tails that link the words. The design is in black ink only, with no shading or colour, and the text is arranged in two lines with NOT set smaller between them.

Lettering Quote Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The brush split on the third stroke of the P, and Ruth Ambler swore at it in the voice she had picked up from her father and the lorry engines. Mr Tully stood on the pavement with his hands in his coat pockets, watching her through the glass as though the window might change its mind if he looked away long enough.

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He wanted PERFECTION in gold leaf across the window of his new cake shop on Market Row by Saturday. She had practised for a week on brown paper pinned along the workshop wall. Every sheet had the same fault. The long P would start well, a clean swoop like a gull turning, then the tail would stagger and lose its nerve near the end of the word.

Walter Pike came in on the Thursday with his bad hip and a cup of tea he did not drink. He had taught her to lay gold size and pull a line without ruling it first. He studied the sheets, then drew one P in charcoal, fast, the tail running off the paper and back in a single breath. 'Stop trying to make it right,' he said. 'Make it go. The wobble's only the bit you can't see yet.' Then he went back out into the rain.

On Saturday she painted the whole word in one go and let the tail run out past where a sensible sign-writer would have stopped. Mr Tully frowned, then did not. By Monday the bakery had sold out of everything in its window, and a little girl kept pressing her nose to the glass to trace the loop of the final n with one finger. Ruth left the small dark blot where her brush had rested at the end, and nobody else noticed it at all.