Close-up of black and grey script lettering with shaded flourishes across the lower abdomen, with a green succulent plant tattoo at the upper right.

Script lettering with flourishes across the stomach

Lettering · Other · Mixed · Photo

A close-up of a wide band of bold script lettering across the lower abdomen, with black and grey shading that gives the letters depth. Ornate swirling flourishes extend above and below the words, and the lettering is partly obscured by the edge of a dark garment at the bottom of the frame. A green succulent plant with shaded leaves sits at the upper right in colour, while the rest of the design is black and grey against lightly lit skin.

Lettering Other Script Lettering Flourish Succulent Plant Abdomen

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada had the brush loaded with black before the rain stopped, and she was not going to waste it. Mr Feld had paid her in advance to repaint the fascia of the Sea Breeze boarding house, a board nine feet long that had hung above the door since his father's day and now read only SEA BR EZE in flaking gold. She had worked out the flourishes on squared paper at the kitchen table over three nights, swirls that curled back on themselves like the foam on the shingle below.

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The lettering was the easy part. Her father had taught her to lean into a downstroke and lift off clean, and the capitals came up dark and proud against the cream ground. It was the shadow that took the afternoon. She ran a grey wash along the underside of each letter so the words seemed to lift off the board, and when the light came round from the bay the whole name seemed to stand a little proud of the wood.

Mr Feld came out at five with his tea and stood squinting up at it. He did not say it was good. He said the sea had never looked so dark, and asked whether she could put a window box of succulents under the sign, the fat green sort that lived on nothing but salt air. She painted three rosettes of leaves in the lower corner, shaded the way her mother shaded cabbages, and he touched one with a wet finger to see if it would smudge.

It did not. Before she climbed down she tucked her initials into the curl of the final flourish, small enough that only someone looking for them would find them, and then she stood in the wet street and watched the guests come down to breakfast under her work.