Black line drawing of the word strength in flowing script, with an infinity loop swash looping around it, shown as a tattoo design on a white background.

Strength script with infinity loop

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

The image shows the word strength written in a flowing, joined script with a looped swash that forms an infinity symbol behind and around the lettering. The linework is fine and even in black on a plain white background, with no shading or colour. The lettering runs diagonally across the centre of the composition, with the loops extending to either side.

Lettering Strength Script Infinity Swirl Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lintel over the gate at Carrow Keep had lost most of its letters to frost before I was born, and the trust wanted them back for the spring open day. Mr Pryce, who ran the place with a clipboard and a dented thermos, handed me a photograph of the original from 1911 and said, "Just the word, love. Whatever the swirl is, do that too." I had cut headstones for nine years. I had never tried a line that wanted to go round itself.

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I spent a week on the stone in the wind with a mallet and a pointed tool. The word came first, leaning uphill from left to right, the s low and the h as tall as a gatepost. Then the swash. In the old photograph it swung out from the final letters, rose over the top of the word, looped back under its own tail and came round again, so the whole thing read like a sum with no answer. Every time I lifted the tool at the join, the line seemed to want to carry on without me.

On the Thursday an old woman in a green anorak stopped at the fence and watched. She said her grandfather had been the mason's boy in 1911, and that they had never once taken the chisel off the stone to finish that loop. "He said you don't stop in the middle of a thing you mean," she said, and walked off before I could ask what she meant by it.

I finished on the Friday without lifting the chisel once. The swash closed where it began and the word sat in the middle of it, held. That evening I found a chalk mark in the mud beside the gate, a single loop drawn in one unbroken stroke, and I left it where it was for the rain.