Black hand-lettered script design on a white background reading Sometimes you win, sometimes you learn, with looping flourishes and a swash capital L.

Sometimes you win, sometimes you learn lettering

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A black ink hand-lettered design in flowing script reads Sometimes you win, sometimes you learn, set across three lines on a plain white background. The linework is even and monoline, with decorative swashes on the S, the Y and the L and a full stop after the final word. The composition is centred and has no shading or colour.

Lettering Quote Script Flourish

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The banner over the ring had gone grey at the hems by the time Mr Pargeter decided we would have it repainted, and he chose the words himself, scratched onto a feed sack in pencil: Sometimes you win, sometimes you learn. Nobody asked what it meant. We were on the wet fields outside Doncaster with eleven horses, two clowns who no longer spoke, and a generator that coughed whenever the lion cub sneezed.

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Our sign painter, a thin man called Osric Vane who had once lettered the sides of gasworks, came to the tent with his brushes wrapped in a tea towel. He ran his tongue over his teeth and studied the sack for a long while. 'The S wants a swash,' he said, 'or it'll look like it's apologising.' So he gave the S a curl like a fern in the frost, and a loop on the Y that turned back on itself, and when he reached the L of Learn he drew it sweeping under the line as if feeling for a step in the dark.

We hung it that Friday. Takings were nineteen pounds and some coppers. Pargeter stood under the banner with his hat in his hands and read it aloud twice, and the second time his voice cracked on learn. I thought he would sell the horses. Instead he counted the coppers into four piles, one for each of us, and said that was the lesson, and nobody laughed because nobody had the breath.

Osric packed his brushes that night and left the tea towel folded on the tent pole. In the morning I found he had painted a small full stop after learn, in the same black, as if the sentence had only just finished being true. We are still on the road. The banner has been patched twice, and the full stop is the only part that never faded.