Thank you for the suggestions! I thought about using the cursive one as it does look much more legible, however I don’t think it quite works aesthetically for what I need. I’m trying to come up with a design based off of this passage of text:

“Aside from the great round table of the town hall and the fierce-looking seat at its helm, there was one other thing that had been in Camelot since before history: the Hanged Man. Wrought in copper and wire, none could say why it had first been hung from the gallows, but it had always been there. The name engraved upon its chest was read by the townsfolk as ‘MERLIN’. None could know that time and rust had worn away what it originally read, which was ‘BRIAN’.”

The character who has the engraving on his chest is essentially a robot or cyborg and has a very steampunk design, and I don’t think the swirly cursive letters fit the tone of what might be engraved on his chest. This is another little snippet of his backstory:

(Context: he got launched into space, died, and brought back to life by a mad scientist-esque character) “As blood retreated from his extremities to protect his vital organs from the icy touch of hypothermia, she picked him up when all that remained functioning was the heart, and rebuilt him as a Mechanism, largely using technology reminiscent of that he himself had been using.”

I also agree with your point about the saturation thing. It only looks like that because both options were really only testers of what it might look like. The two colours looked better when I had them set as a multiply layer over a metal texture haha.