Black ink script lettering design with stippled shading, dots and swirling flourishes, drawn on white paper.

Script lettering design with dotwork shading

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A repeated word is drawn in bold, looping script with flourishes and swashes curling around the letters. The letters have dense stippled and dotted shading along one side, and scattered dots fill the background. The image is black ink on white paper with a technical pen visible in the bottom corner.

Lettering Dotwork Lettering Script Flourishes Swirl Dot Shading

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Abernethy wanted the word painted twice on the shutter of her chandler's shop in Scarborough, one line above the other, and she was particular about the comma. I had been sign-writing for thirty years and never once been asked to make a comma look like it had something to say for itself. So I mixed the gold size, cut my brushes to a point, and spent three days on the first line alone.

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The trouble started on the Thursday, when the tide came up the harbour steps and stayed there. Mrs Abernethy stood on the quay with her hands deep in her coat and told me the word was not believed. "Really, Mr Pell," she said, "it has to be said twice or nobody takes a blind notice." I told her a sign that needs saying twice is a sign that has already lost an argument. She did not laugh, and I think that was the first honest thing either of us had said all week.

On the last morning I finished the lower line with a swash that curled back under the first, the way a wave folds over its own reflection. I shaded the down-strokes with dots, thousands of them, because the light off the water had been nagging at me since Monday and I wanted the letters to look as though they had weight. Mrs Abernethy came out with her spectacles pushed up on her head and read it slowly, once, then again, the way you read a letter from someone you have decided to forgive.

"Yes," she said. "Now they'll have to believe me."