Black ink flash sheet of Shakespeare quotes in script and typewriter lettering, with a small skull and a wreath design.

Shakespeare quote lettering flash sheet

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A flash sheet of lettering designs on a white background, reading Brevity is the soul of wit, Give every man thine ear; but few thy voice, Words, words, words, To be, or not to be, This above all; to thine own self be true, and The rest is silence. A small line-drawn skull sits beside the typewriter-style quote, and a black wreath-like frame surrounds the To be, or not to be phrase. The work is entirely black linework and lettering with no shading or colour.

Lettering Quote Lettering Script Skull Wreath Typewriter font Handwriting

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down by the bean rows, Tomas, and stop fiddling with that string. My grandmother told this one under this same crooked plum, and she always started with the quarrel, because brevity is the soul of wit and she never once managed it. Two sisters, Hester and Agnes Marrowby, and a green wooden gate between their cottages that Hester swore had crept two inches towards her overnight.

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For a month they did not speak. Hester typed her grievances on the schoolmaster's old machine and pinned them to the gatepost, and Agnes answered in a looping hand that filled the whole back of the page. Their neighbour, Mr Pell, read every note aloud over the hedge and sighed, Words, words, words, until his wife made him stop. Give every man thine ear, she told him, but few thy voice, Mr Pell, or you'll be the third party in this.

Then came the frost that killed Agnes's dahlias. Hester found the gate open one morning and the path between the cottages trodden flat, and pinned to the post was a single line in her sister's writing: To be, or not to be, that is the question, and I have chosen to be neighbourly. Hester laughed so hard she had to sit on the step. Years later she told me the gate had never moved at all. Agnes had been carrying its hinges across the lane every night, a little at a time, so her sister would have to come and fetch them.

Now go and put the kettle on, and when Agnes's great-grandchildren come up the lane, don't you dare tell them who moved the gate. The rest is silence.