Black design drawing of a row of spiral and angular symbols above the word UNFOUND in serif lettering on a white background.

Unfound lettering with spiral symbols

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A black ink design on a plain white background shows a row of six spiral and hooked symbols stacked above the word UNFOUND in bold serif capitals. The linework is solid and flat with no shading, and the lettering has slightly uneven, hand-drawn edges. The composition is centred and horizontal, with the symbols and text filling the width of the frame.

Lettering Lettering Spiral Symbol Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, lad, you are blocking the wind, and I cannot tell this to a man standing over me like a fence post. Good. Now look at the stones at the lip of the pass. Whoever cut those marks had no letters, only the road, and for every bend a carter must take to get over, they cut a coil. Six coils, six bends. The clerks who came later called the valley beyond the summit Unfound, because the mapmakers from the lowland towns sent men up with chains and paper, and the men always came down saying the place was not there.

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One autumn a shepherd's girl called Ewa Brannock took her flock up past the sixth coil, though the snow had come early and the sky looked like wet slate. The mist rolled down like fleece off a sheep's back. She walked the spiral the way you would walk a dog round a field, round and round, trusting her feet. When the mist lifted she was standing at the bottom of the same gully, with the same bleating ewe at her knee, and above her on the rock a seventh coil had been cut that nobody living had ever seen.

She kept walking, because a spiral has only one way out and it is never the way you were looking. The valley she found had no name on any chain or map, only a bell with its clapper tied up in red wool. The people asked where she had come from, and she said the lowlands. They laughed kindly and told her nobody had come from the lowlands in three hundred years.

So when the mapmakers climb up with their chains now, we point them at the stones and say, go on then, follow the coils. They always do. And they always come down with blank paper and quiet faces, and do you know what they tell us? That they walked round for days and somehow ended up exactly where they started, with the sheep looking pleased about it.