How to clean a scan of handwriting?

[Gerenuk]

I'd like to clean up a short piece of handwriting (like a signature; see attachment). I found some kind of thresholding in Gimp, but ended up cleaning a lot with the eraser.

Could you please suggest an approach / tools that seems best to get a single color version of the writing only?

Ideally it should be the lines only, no stray dots, a fairly smooth edge of the written lines and in the end a single color stroke.