Black lettering tattoo of the word Believe in a script style, with a swirled flourish beneath it, on the ankle.

Believe script with swirls on ankle

Lettering · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo reads Believe in a flowing script, with the B and l rising above the lowercase letters. A line of curling swirls runs beneath the word and tapers to the right. The linework is solid black with grey shading inside some letters, and the design fills the width of the ankle in a centred composition.

Lettering Ankle Believe Script Swirl Flourish Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ink ran out somewhere past the Azores, so Mother wrote the last words of the captain's log in pencil, and that is why the B in the family Bible looks like a pencil stub. I was nine and sitting on the chest of the cabin, watching her press so hard the lead snapped twice. Father had sworn the Halcyon would make Valparaíso by Lent. Instead we drifted in a calm for eleven days, and the sailors took to lettering their names on the bulkheads just to have something to do with their hands.

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On the twelfth morning a boy from Cork named Tully brought a tin of soot and a scrap of sail-cloth to our door. He could draw a swirl like nobody I have since seen, a curl that doubled back on itself like a wave deciding whether to break. He sketched the word for Mother on the cloth, big and leaning, the B standing tall over the rest as if it were checking the horizon. She laughed and told him the sea would have to answer for it, and he said the sea had already answered, it had given us the stillness.

Wind came back that afternoon, and so did Father's temper, but the swirls stayed with me when we finally tied up in the harbour. Tully went ashore to find work in the rope walks and I never learned if he got on. What I still carry is that flourish running under the word, rolling out to nothing on the right like a tide going slack, and Mother's pencil line beneath it, faint and stubborn, that she never let me rub away.