Black ink drawing of decorative script lettering with shaded capitals, swirling flourishes and a leaf motif, drawn on paper beside a black fineliner pen.

Script lettering with flourishes

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A hand-drawn design of ornate script lettering with shaded capitals and thin, looping flourishes. Leaf and feather-like sprigs curl around the letters. It is drawn in black ink on white paper, with a fineliner pen lying across the lower right of the frame.

Lettering Script Lettering Flourish Leaves Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Okonedo never let me touch the capitals. He said a sign was a promise made to people who walked past without stopping, and the first letter had to be made in one clean pull of the brush or not at all. I had been his boy for two years in Harwick, painting bakers' names and bus timetables on the side of the Co-op, and I still got the rules wrong about half the time.

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The commission that autumn came from Edith Pryce, who ran the draper's on Chapel Street and wanted her window to say more than the shop's name. She brought a scrap of her late mother's handwriting, a looping thing with tails that ran off the edge of the card, and asked for it in gold leaf on black. Okonedo held the scrap to the lamp for a long while, then handed it to me and went out for his tea.

I worked three evenings with a fine sable and a pot of ink I was not supposed to use outdoors. I shaded the capitals in short hard strokes so the letters seemed to turn away from the light, and let the flourishes spill round the word like the sprig of fern Edith had pressed in her Bible. On the last night my hand went loose and the tails grew longer than the pencil guide. I nearly scraped it. Okonedo came back from the pub smelling of it, looked at the window for so long I thought I was sacked, then said, "Leave it. Somebody will want to follow that line with their eye."

Edith sold the shop eleven years later, and the new owner painted over the glass. I still think about that line when I pass a blank window, and how far the tail went before it stopped.