Black and grey script tattoo reading 1 Corinthians 13 with an anchor beneath it, on the side of a torso below a grey top.

Anchor and scripture lettering on the side

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows the words 1 Corinthians 13 in flowing script lettering, with a numeric verse reference at the end. A dark anchor sits beneath and behind the text, with its ring at the upper left and its flukes curving under the lettering. The ink is solid black on pale skin, and the photo is taken close up in greyscale, with a grey fabric edge across the top of the frame.

Lettering Ribs Anchor Script Lettering Scripture Bible verse

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The band has stopped pretending to play Glenn Miller, and the floor is emptying in that slow way it does near midnight, so you are the only one left at the cloakroom hatch when Tom Harrow comes back for his cap. He has danced with everybody's sister all evening and has not once asked you, which is why you are surprised when he leans on the counter and says, 'You're on the late shift, Ivy. Don't you ever get asked?'

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'Not by men who can't count their steps,' you say, and he laughs, and then he asks for the last waltz anyway, the one the bandleader plays for couples with nowhere else to be. You hand him the cap in exchange for a dance. Out on the sprung boards he holds you the way his mother must have taught him, a little stiff, and he counts under his breath, one two three, and you let him be wrong about the time all the way to the final chord.

He sails with the Sheila Mae at six. At the hatch he presses a folded bus ticket into your palm, and on the back, in pencil, is a line copied from his mother's old Bible about the greatest of these being love, with the verse reference beneath it. Below that he has drawn a small anchor, its ring badly shaped, its flukes curling like a hand closing. 'Hope holds,' he says. 'That's what she used to tell me. Keep it till I'm back.'

You keep it. You pin it inside your coat, against the cloakroom tickets, and you tell yourself it is only a bus ticket. The tide turns, the boats come in or they don't, and every Thursday you count your steps to the hall door, one two three, the way he never could.