# The last letter is still there, on the cut edge > Cutting the armholes down to the waist means cutting through the print itself — the word survives, barely, with its last letter sitting right on the ragged edge. August 21, 2026 · https://justog.club/stories/the-band-tee-cut-into-a-vest A forest green t-shirt, sleeves and neckband gone, the armholes cut so deep the sides stand open from underarm to waist. Across the chest, in heavy capitals: `NIGHTJAR`. The cut runs right through the end of the word — the last letter sits directly on the ragged edge. The word is still there. It just barely made it. ## Why cut the armholes deep enough to reach the print? Because the cut was made for the fit, and the print sat wherever it sat. Deepening an armhole down toward the waist is a fit decision, not a graphic one — it's about how much the sides of the shirt hang open and how loose the whole garment reads once the cut is made. Nobody measured against where the lettering ended before starting. The print happened to run wide enough that the cut line reached it, and the cut didn't stop early to avoid it. ## Did the cut destroy the word? No — every letter of `NIGHTJAR` is still legible. The last one just sits on the cut edge itself, where the ragged line of the armhole passes directly beside it rather than through it. That's a narrower margin than the print was designed with, and it's the part of the shirt that actually holds the eye: a word that was printed with clearance on every side, now printed with none on one of them. Reading it means reading right up to where the fabric stops. ## What does it mean that the print lost out to the fit? It's a ranking, made in one cut: the shape of the garment on the body mattered more than preserving the graphic that had already been printed on it. A printed t-shirt is usually treated as a finished object — the print is the reason it exists in its current form. Cutting an armhole close enough to graze the lettering treats the print as one layer of the shirt rather than the point of it, on par with the cloth around it. [The same logic governs a sleeve cut close to a seam](/stories/the-sleeves-came-off-first): the garment's fit on the body outranked the parts of it that were fixed at the factory. ## Why does an invented word work better here than a real one? Because `NIGHTJAR` doesn't have to survive intact to still mean something, and a real logo would carry a claim about surviving that it can't back up. A licensed word or logo is somebody's design, and turning it into something half-legible by accident is a different conversation from choosing to. The permission for a real one is a normal licensing question and worth having if a specific mark actually matters to the piece — but an invented word can be cut right through its last letter and the only thing lost is a letter, not somebody else's finished artwork. The same is true of [lettering put on by hand rather than printed](/stories/the-back-panel-painted-by-hand): whoever made the mark is the one whose permission a real version would need. ## Is a deep-cut armhole just a sleeveless shirt? No — a shirt bought sleeveless was cut for that shape from the start, with hems finished around every opening it was going to have. A deep armhole cut from a sleeved shirt after the fact opens further down the side than most factory sleeveless cuts go, runs raw rather than hemmed, and — as here — can run straight into whatever was already printed on the garment. The two end up looking similar from a distance and tell completely different stories up close. ## Does the depth of the cut matter, or just where it lands? Both — a shallower cut through the same print might have missed the lettering by a few centimetres, and there's no way to know that without cutting. That's the part that makes this alteration one-way in a stricter sense than most: the sleeves can be measured and re-cut shorter as many times as somebody's willing to try, but an armhole cut through a printed word can't be walked back to see what a shallower line would have left behind. Whatever the depth turns out to be is the depth that's there. ## Does printed lettering like this survive a cut well? Flat colour and a hard printed edge hold up to a scissors cut exactly as well as they hold up to a wash — the print doesn't degrade differently because of the cut, it's just missing wherever the fabric is missing. What matters more is contrast: heavy block capitals in a solid colour, like `NIGHTJAR` here, stay readable even with a ragged edge running past the last letter, in a way [a script or a hand-drawn mark](/stories/the-slogan-you-wrote-yourself) wouldn't. Thin strokes lose more to a rough cut than thick ones do. ## How do I get one made? Describe the print at [JustOG](/) — the word or graphic, and how close it should run to where the armholes are cut. Pick a direction, drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and it's made to order and shipped. Designs other people have published are in the [shop](/shop). One letter, right on the edge, and it's still there.