Fine line black script reading Believe along the side of a finger, with a thin line trailing down to a small leaf near the knuckle.

Believe script and leaf on a finger

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A close-up of a finger held against the lips, showing the word Believe written in thin black script along the side of the finger. A fine black line curves from the lettering down towards the knuckle, ending in a small leaf shape. The image is softly lit with a shallow depth of field, and the ink is the only colour in the frame apart from skin tones.

Fine line Lettering Hand Believe Script Leaf Line Finger

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hush, my mother would say, one finger lifted to her lips, and the kitchen on Scarrow Head went quiet as a held breath. Hush was the first rule of the light and the last. You did not shout up the spiral stair while the lamp was turning. You did not argue with the fog. For thirty-one years she kept the lamp at the top of ninety-six iron steps, and I learned the rules before I learned my letters.

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The spring I turned sixteen, a boy came over on the post boat with a tin of seed potatoes and a question. Tomas, from the harbour school, wanted to know whether the bell buoy off the Mare's Teeth really rang when nobody touched it. I told him what I had been taught to tell visitors. The sea makes its own noise. Believe what you can see from the gallery and nothing else. He looked at me as though I had said something unkind, and I was sorry for it.

That night the fog came in thick, and the bell did ring, one slow stroke after another, out past the sandbar. I climbed with the wind pulling at my coat and my hand against the cold rail. A sycamore leaf had caught in the iron below the gallery door, curled and brown at the edges, pinned there as if someone had placed it. My mother's logbook lay open on the desk below the stair. Beneath the tide tables, in her careful hand, she had written: Believe the light. The bell is only the sea remembering.

I turned the brass key a quarter turn and stood a while in the hush. Then I pressed one finger to my lips, the way she had taught me, and went down to make the tea.