Black ink script lettering samples with flourishes, including phrases such as Adaggio and Love Catalogue, and a full lowercase and numeral alphabet along the bottom.

Script lettering specimen sheet

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A sheet of black script lettering samples on white, ranging from large display phrases to small decorative words. Each sample uses fine, flowing strokes with looped swashes and extended tails, and the sizes vary from headline to caption. A row of lowercase letters, capitals, numerals and symbols runs along the bottom edge.

Lettering Script Lettering Flourishes Alphabet Calligraphy Numeral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

No, leave the brush where it is, you'll only drag the tail of that capital and spoil it. Sit on the bollard and hold the pot still. There. Thirty-one years I lettered boats along this quay, and the thing nobody tells you is that script wants to be read slowly, the way you'd read a letter from someone you miss.

Keep reading

Vera Tonks came down the slip one wet March with a tin of money and a word on a scrap of cardboard. Adagio. Her husband Len had hummed it over the engine every morning for forty years, slow as a tide, and she wanted it on the bow of the Second Chance before the fleet went north. I told her the hairlines would drown in salt. She said let them drown, then. So I mixed black with a drop of the gloss we used for the wheelhouse, let the capital A sweep up like a gull lifting off, and let the g's loop back under themselves like a line pulled taut and let go.

The boat went out on the Monday with the others. Nine days later the weather came round the headland hard, and the Second Chance was the last one in, low in the water, the name on her bow still wet-bright in the rain. Vera stood on the wall with her hands in her coat. Nobody spoke. Then the swashes caught the lamplight from the harbour office and the whole word seemed to hang in the air above the water, every loop lit.

She paid me the rest in coins, counted out on that bollard where you're sitting. Forty pounds, and a kipper wrapped in yesterday's paper. Len would have laughed, she said. I think he would have sat right where you are and read it slow.