Black script lettering on a white background reading "Put God first and you'll never be last." in flowing, brushed strokes.

Script lettering quote: Put God first

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

The image shows the phrase "Put God first and you'll never be last." set in an ornate, flowing script across three lines. The letterforms have feathered, distressed edges and long looping tails that extend beyond the words. It is rendered in solid black ink on a plain white background with no body part or shading visible.

Lettering Script Lettering Quote Phrase Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Pryce had the brush loaded with lamp black and the board clamped flat on the trestle when the vicar's wife came in out of the rain to complain about the spacing. "Put God first," she read aloud, tapping the draft with a gloved finger, "and then the rest can fall where it likes. Can you run the tail of that y further? Right to the edge."

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He could. He had a steady hand and a steadier opinion that a flourish ought to earn its room. Thirty years of gilding shop fronts in Halifax had taught him that a long tail on a capital told a passer-by someone had been patient. His apprentice, Wilf, a boy of fifteen with ink to the wrist, watched him stretch the loop of the y across the grain until it nearly kissed the frame.

The trouble came with the last line. Wilf took the brush for the final word while Pryce went to see about the kettle, and when he came back the boy had let the tail of the l in "last" slip clean off the board and curl onto the bare pine. The vicar's wife would have it sanded. Pryce told her it was a mistake, and then, to his own surprise, that he would not scrape it.

It hangs in the vestry now, the board yellowed at the corners. Pryce has been dead nine years, and Wilf, grown and grey, still goes in on Sundays to put the kettle on. The tail of that l runs past the frame and over the plaster, a fine black thread nobody has ever bothered to wipe away.