Pencil sketch of the words Stay a little longer in flowing script lettering with swirled flourishes, drawn on paper beside a stencil and an eraser.

Stay a little longer script lettering sketch

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of the phrase Stay a little longer in connected script lettering, with looping flourishes and faint guidelines visible behind the letters. The linework is grey and sketchy, with light shading and no colour. The lettering fills the centre of the sheet, with a stencil at the top left, an eraser at the top right and a metal tool at the right edge.

Lettering Script Lettering Flourishes Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The orchard at Hollins End went quiet in the last week of August, once the Bramleys had dropped and the wasps had given up on the windfalls. I sat on the tailgate of Uncle Ray's van with a drawing board across my knees, trying to get the phrase to sit right. Aunt Nell wanted it painted on the old pressing shed door, and she wanted it looping the way her mother's handwriting looped on the lid of a shortbread tin that still held buttons.

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My first attempt leaned too far, the capitals tumbling over one another like guests leaving a wedding too late. I rubbed them out with the grey eraser from my apron pocket, which left a ghost of the S and a smear that the evening wind pushed across the sheet. I drew the guidelines again, light as I could, tilting the baseline up toward the ridge where the sun still caught the top rows of trees.

Nell came down the row with a bucket of early pears and read over my shoulder without asking. "Stay a little longer," she said slowly, then, drier: "Is that for the pears or the pickers?" I told her it was for her. She laughed and said nobody had asked her to stay anywhere since her husband took the train to Leeds in 1974, and that she had decided not to wait for an answer.

I kept the pencil guidelines in the finished drawing, the faint slanting lines behind every word, so anyone reading it could see how the letters had been held up. Rubber crumbs dusted the corner of the sheet like blossom in May. Nell tilted the board toward the light, nodded once, and said the words looked as though they had been walked back and forth a few times before they agreed to settle.