Flash design of a cream ribbon banner with black script reading a quote about stars and returning, set on a purple background with black stars, drawn in a neo-traditional style.

Ribbon banner with a star-scattered quote

Lettering · Colour · Flash

A digital drawing of a cream and peach ribbon banner coiled across the frame, carrying four lines of black cursive script that read a quote about time, stars, light and dust. The ribbon has bold black outlines and soft shading, and black stars are scattered around its edges against a mottled purple background. The composition is centred and vertical, with the text running diagonally along each ribbon section.

Lettering Neo-trad Ribbon Banner Star Script Quote

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mo had been told twice to stop fiddling with the ribbon and once to stop talking, so she kept her mouth shut while Ernest Vane blotted the last loop of the scroll on the cuff of his shirt. The workshop above the chandler's on Pilot Street smelled of gold size and turpentine, with the sea coming up through the floorboards. Rain ticked on the skylight. The commission had come from a widow in Hallow Cove who wanted the words painted on the stern of her husband's boat before it went back into the water.

Keep reading

The words were not Ernest's. He had copied them from a card tucked inside the lid of an old sea chest, the ink faded to the brown of weak tea. Mo asked whose they were. He said they belonged to Tobias Crane, the man who had taught him to letter forty years ago, before Crane sailed out on the Corinna and never came back. Ernest had always meant to paint them on something worth keeping. Now there was a boat to put them on.

He asked her to hold the lamp steady while the gold went on in thin passes. The black script ran the length of each band, leaning like a hull on a tack, and the stars he had scattered round the margins caught the light as if someone had flicked a brush of paint across the purple. Dust turned in the lamp's beam. Ernest said Crane used to call it the sweepings of the sky, that everything went round in a circle eventually.

His hand shook on the final word. Mo took the brush from him without asking, drew the last stroke under where I began, and watched the bright dust settle on the windowsill like a fine scatter of stars. Ernest didn't speak for a long while. Then he said the boat would need its name painted under the quote, and that she would have to be the one to do it.