Black lettering design forming a running shoe silhouette, with words including inspiration, courage, determination and every step counts.

Running shoe made of motivational words

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A running shoe silhouette is built from black words and phrases, including inspiration, courage, never quit, commitment, determination, I can do it and every step counts. A small running figure sits near the heel. The lettering mixes bold uppercase, condensed and script faces, with solid black fills and some hatched strokes on the shoe's laces and heel, on a plain white background.

Lettering Sneaker Text Courage

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit, the kettle's on and the peat is good tonight. You want the tale of Dougal Brae and the cobbler's shoes? Then listen, for I'll not tell it twice.

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Dougal carried the post over the hill road from the pier to the far crofts, eleven miles of it, and every morning he ran it, because the ferry waited for nobody and the mail had to be on it. Old Ruaridh the cobbler kept a shop by the harbour wall, and when Dougal's boots gave out for the third time that winter, the cobbler took them off him and said, sit down, boy, you'll not run in those again.

He took a sheet of tallow-stained paper and wrote on it in pencil, word by word, till the bench was covered. Courage, he wrote. Commitment. Determination. Never quit. He cut the words into strips and stitched them into the uppers of a new pair, so the shape of the shoe was made of nothing but the things a man needs when the rain is in his teeth and the hill is steeper than it looked. I can do it, he wrote across the heel, and every step counts along the toe, though the stitches were crooked and the letters ran together like wet ink.

Dougal laughed at them, then wore them for twelve winters. On the last morning of the season he came down the hill with the bag over his shoulder and the sea wind behind him, and the boat was already slipping past the skerry. He ran the last half mile along the shore with the words wearing thin under his feet, and he caught it. The captain swore the mail came over the rail into his hand with the boy's breath still smoking, and that the words on the shoes could still be read from the water.