Hand-drawn lettering design reading Scintillare in tall dark ink, with small four-point stars and the word shimmer written beneath on cream paper.

Scintillare lettering with stars

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A hand-drawn lettering design spells the word Scintillare in tall, narrow dark letters across the middle of a cream sheet. Small four-pointed stars surround the top and bottom corners, and the word shimmer is written in smaller, thinner handwriting beneath. The linework is solid and uniform in a single dark ink, with no shading and no colour.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The commission arrived on a Tuesday, pinned to a card in Mrs Abernethy's neat capitals: one shopfront, one word, painted by Friday. The word was Scintillare. Tobias Crane had never heard it, and when he asked what it meant she only shrugged and said it was Latin for the sort of thing the chandler's window did after rain.

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He spent Wednesday night with a dictionary that smelt of pipe smoke and a cup of tea going cold beside his brushes. To sparkle, to flash, to glitter in the dark. He tried the letters tall and narrow, the way the old bakers on Fenwick Lane had painted their names, each stroke pulled thin so the word seemed to stand on its toes. The S came out like a question. The double l stretched up towards the gaslamp until it looked ready to leave the glass.

On Thursday the rain stopped at four, and the gutters ran silver under the lamps. Tobias stood on the pavement with his tin of ink and a row of small four-pointed stars he had dashed into the margins, and wondered whether he had gone soft. Then he wrote the translation beneath in a smaller, wobblier hand, SHIMMER, because the chandler had insisted that people should be told what they were looking at.

The chandler came out in his apron, squinted up at the wet letters, and said nothing at all. He only tapped the glass twice with a knuckle, the way you do when something has finally caught the light.