Script lettering tattoo on upper chest

The bakery sign went up on Tuesday, and I'll say it plainly: I got the R wrong on the first pass. Mr Okonedo saw it and let it stand anyway, because he says a shop should look like somebody made it. Don't take that as a licence to be careless. Gold leaf wants a steady wrist and a dry morning, and we had neither, so I painted the whole thing twice, once in the damp and again when the fog lifted off the quay.

Your aunt came by with the little turquoise pendant she wants re-strung and asked whether I'd letter something for her friend's birthday card. I said I'd only do it if she wrote the words out herself, because I can't trust a phrase that's been spoken across a counter. She brought them on the back of a ferry ticket, in pencil, pressed so hard the paper dented. The letters leaned as if they were walking into a wind nobody else could feel.

I traced them onto tracing paper and sat with them a whole evening before I understood the crookedness was the point. You don't correct a hand like that. You keep its slope, its pauses, the place where the pencil lifted and came back down. I inked it fine and even, with the thinnest nib I own, and kept every lean. When it was done I held it to the lamp, and the shadow of the new line fell across the bench exactly as the old one had fallen across the ticket.

Send me a photograph of your practice sheets. I want to see where your own hand wanders, and whether you've had the sense to leave it alone.

Love, Bev