Black silhouette of a leaping whale with the words Do what is right, not what is easy set in white distressed lettering across its body, drawn in a vintage woodcut style.

Whale with Do What Is Right quote

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A solid black whale silhouette leaps to the right, with its tail fluke raised at the lower right. The words DO WHAT IS RIGHT and NOT WHAT IS EASY are cut out in white across the body in a curved, distressed serif lettering, with fine speckled textures and scratchy marks giving a letterpress feel. The design is shown in black on a plain light grey background with no shading or colour.

Lettering Whale Quote Lettering Sea creature

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mara had the brush loaded with white enamel when the rain started, and she swore quietly because the curve of a hull is the hardest part of any lettering. The trawler Constance Vell sat in the dry dock off Humber Street under sodium lamps, her owner gone to Spain with the money and the bank's letters stacked unopened on the wheelhouse step. Someone had paid Mara in cash to have her repainted by morning, and she had not asked what they meant to call her instead.

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She worked the serifs first, the way her father had taught her in a shed behind the fish market, sweeping each letter in one breath so the edges kept their bite. Halfway along the bow a gull landed on the rail above her, watched her with one yellow eye, and left. Her hand did not shake. A man in a good coat had offered her double to skip the old motto on the stern, the one about the sea taking what it is owed, and she had told him she only painted what was written down.

Beneath the bowsprit she had already finished the whale, a black shape leaping with its fluke flung up like a question mark, the way her father always drew them, scratching the speckle into the paint with the end of a bristle. Across its back ran the words she had chosen herself because nobody had told her otherwise: DO WHAT IS RIGHT, then NOT WHAT IS EASY curving down toward the tail.

By three the paint had to set before the second coat, so she sat on an upturned crate and watched the rain bead on the white letters. Under the new grey, faint where she had thinned it, the old name still showed through. She left it there. Let the harbour office find it in the morning and decide for themselves what the boat was called.