Black and grey lettering tattoo on the thigh with an outlined cross and the script words I can do all things, plus Philippians 4:13 beneath.

Cross and lettering tattoo on the thigh

Lettering · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph of a thigh with a black tattoo showing an outlined cross on the left and the script words I can do all things running across it. The smaller typed line Philippians 4:13 sits beneath the script. The image is black and white with clean, even linework and a plain background, and the wearer's dark top covers the upper body.

Lettering Thigh Cross Lettering Script Quote Bible verse

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, love, the kettle's still warm and bed four won't wake before the drugs round. Let me tell you about Walter Ince, who pushed the trolleys along this corridor when the building still had gas lamps in the stairwell, or near enough. Walter had a bad hip and a worse temper, and every night he counted the doors aloud, the way other men say their prayers.

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The winter of the big frost, the boiler in the basement died at two in the morning and the ward went cold fast. Sister Pell sent Walter down with a torch and a spanner, and he came back an hour later black to the elbows and grinning. "Lost two fingers in a mangle once," he said, "and the doctor told me I'd never grip a rail again. Watch." He gripped the iron rail by the lift and held on while the whole staircase shook. Nobody argued with him after that.

Some nights he pencilled a cross on the back of a spare chart, a plain upright with a bar across it like the crosses on an old map, and underneath he wrote the words he'd heard the chaplain read out at Christmas: I can do all things. He never believed the bit about strength. He believed the bit about doing things, the hauling of frozen pipes, the carrying of old Mr Quayle down two flights when the lift gave up, the pushing of one more trolley when his hip was screaming.

The night the boiler finally caught, the ward lights came up one by one like a row of teeth. Walter sat on an upturned bucket by the lift and wrote the verse on the wall in soot, reference and all. Nobody scrubbed it off. Sister Pell said it was the only honest graffiti she had ever seen. Now drink your tea, and mind the lift on the way out, it still talks.