Dark brown henna design on the back of a hand, with the word Believe in cursive script on the wrist and a cross with swirling ornamental lines on the hand.

Believe script and cross on the back of a hand

Lettering · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A dark henna design covers the back of a hand and wrist, with the word Believe in flowing cursive script across the wrist. Below it, a large cross is outlined with ornamental curls, dotted lines and small teardrop flourishes that trail down towards the fingers. The ink is a single dark brown tone on a bright red background, and the design is framed to show the full hand.

Lettering Hand Cross Believe Script Swirl Dot Henna Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gatehouse of Harrowgate Keep had lost its portcullis long before anyone in Larkhill Village thought to ask about it, and Mrs Ada Pell had kept the key to the chapel door on a loop of red string since the spring her husband went to the mines and did not come back up. She climbed the ridge path each Sunday with a tin of boiled sweets and a dish of seed for the wagtails. The chapel roof had gone in a storm during the old king's reign, but the east wall still held a carved stone cross, and someone, years ago, had painted a word beneath it in neat letters that had faded to a rust-coloured ghost.

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The boy from the farm, Tom Greave, came up one wet afternoon to tell her the sheep had strayed into the moat. He stood dripping in the doorway and read the word aloud, slowly, the way children read things they are not sure they are allowed to say. Ada told him it was a promise, not a prayer, and that the difference mattered more in a place like this. He asked which of them had made the promise. She said she had never found out, and that was the only part of the chapel she was fond of.

They spent the evening tracing the dotted line the old masons had cut into the flagstones, from the cross down towards the threshold, where the dots ran out at a crack wide enough for a finger. Tom pressed his thumb into it and said it felt warm. Ada pretended not to hear. When they finally walked down in the dark, she left the chapel door unlocked for the first time in forty years, and in the morning the seed dish was empty and the boiled sweets were gone, though the wagtails had never once been known to unwrap anything.