Flash sheet of black script lettering tattoo designs with ornate flourishes, including New York City and Happy Times Sad Times, on a cream background.

Script lettering flash sheet with flourishes

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A flash sheet of six script lettering designs stacked in rows, with phrases including New York City, Big City of Dreams and Happy Times Sad Times. The lettering uses bold, looping strokes with fine hairline flourishes and swashes, shaded in black on a cream paper background. Decorative scrollwork fills the top and bottom corners, and the sheet is composed as a set of standalone designs.

Lettering Script Lettering Flourish Swash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last window on Gilt Street was the only one Ada Maddox never finished, because the man who ordered it kept changing his mind about the second line. He stood on the pavement each morning with his hands deep in his coat, reading the first words aloud as if testing ice. Big City of Dreams, he said. Then he frowned and asked for the loops to be wider.

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She worked the way her father had taught her: tracing paper first, pounced through with charcoal dust, then the lamp-black mixed with gum arabic and a sable brush no thicker than a cat's whisker. Her father used to say a swash was a promise you made with your wrist, and you could not take it back once the paint had skinned over. So she drew each curl twice before she trusted it, and the scrollwork in the corners took her three mornings alone.

On the fourth morning the man told her what the sentence was for. His wife had kept it on a card above the stove in the flat they rented before the war, and they had crossed the sea with one suitcase between them and that card tucked inside the lid. He was not sure the words still fitted the life they had now. Ada said nothing. She went back to the glass and wrote the last line small, in the bottom corner where the flourish curled, Happy Times Sad Times, the order they had always been said in at home.

When the gold leaf dried, the street lay reflected in the window, bus lights and wet slates and passers-by, and the lettering seemed to sit on top of all of it. People read the big line first, then the small one underneath, and some of them stopped and went back to the start, as if the day had been turned round to face them.