Hand-drawn script lettering design reading Mind on my money, money on my mind, in black ink on cream paper, being traced by a hand holding a pen.

Script lettering sketch on paper

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A hand traces black ink script lettering over a pencil guide on a cream sketchbook page. The phrase is arranged in three interlocking lines with long looping flourishes and swashes that link the words. The design is shown in black ink on cream paper against a dark wooden surface.

Lettering Lettering Script Sketch Pen Hand Flourish

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dorothy Pask had been lettering shop fronts in Rochdale for thirty-one years, and she could tell a bad swash from across the street. So when the lad from the cash-and-carry slid a greasy napkin across her bench, she didn't laugh. She asked him to say it again, slowly, the way he'd want it read back to him.

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"Mind on my money," he said. "Money on my mind."

She picked up a stub of pencil and started on the back of an old delivery note, letting the loops run long and tying the M in money to the d in mind so the words could lean on each other like two men walking home from the Legion. The first draft looked like a fence in a gale. The second was better. By the fourth she had three lines sitting level on the page, and she told him the trick was the leaning. Take the support away and the whole thing falls over.

He came back a week later, still in his work boots, and watched her ink it with a brush that had belonged to her husband. He didn't say much. When she finally sat back, he counted out the fee in coins, every one of them warm from his pocket, and asked if she'd keep the original. She said she would, and pinned it above the till, where the morning light from the bakery next door caught the flourishes and made the shadows look like they were still being drawn.