Close-up of a blue and grey tattoo on a forearm showing a shaded cross, an equals sign and a shaded heart, with the script 1 John 3:16 beneath.

Cross, equals sign and heart on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a cross on the left, an equals sign in the centre and a heart on the right, with the script line 1 John 3:16 written underneath. The cross and heart are shaded with teal and blue washes over dark grey and black, while the equals sign uses teal-filled bars outlined in black. The photograph is taken close up at an angle against a pale, blurred background.

Lettering Forearm Cross Heart Script Scripture reference

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The vestry clock had stopped at ten past four, and you were still at the trestle table when Dilys Morgan came in out of the rain with her shawl dripping and a question ready. She wanted a verse for her husband's stone, the one about laying down a life, and she wanted it spelled the way the chapel always spelled it, with no mistakes this time. You knew the line before she finished saying it. Nineteen men had gone down the Glynn shaft the winter the roof came in, and Tom Morgan was the last of them to climb out, carrying a boy on his shoulders who was not his own.

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You copied it out three times on the back of a hymn sheet before your hand stopped shaking. First John, chapter three, sixteen. By this we know love. Dilys watched your pen the way she watched the minister, as if one wrong stroke might cost her something. Outside, the rain turned to sleet against the glass and the gas lamps along Chapel Row came on one by one, pale as candles in a draught.

She wanted a drawing too, a small one, to go in the corner. A cross, an equals sign, a heart. She didn't explain it and you didn't ask. You went to the cupboard under the organ stool and found the paintbox your sister left behind when she married and moved to Swansea. The teal cake was nearly gone, but there was enough. You washed the cross in it, let the blue settle in the lower arm, and shaded the wood toward black where it would sit darkest. The heart took the same treatment. The two bars of the sign you left hollow, then filled them with teal, like a ledger that had finally come out even.

When Dilys left she folded the sheet twice and tucked it inside her coat, against her chest. The last thing you saw was her boot print on the wet vestry step, already filling with sleet. In the morning the paper had dried to the colour of the sea off Porthcawl, and you pinned it to the board by the door, under the names.