Black line drawing of a cross joined to a heartbeat line that forms a heart, with the words FAITH, HOPE and LOVE beneath, shown as a tattoo design on a white background.

Cross, heartbeat and heart design

Black and grey · Flash

A black line drawing shows an upright cross on the left, followed by a heartbeat trace that rises and falls before curving into an open heart outline on the right. The words FAITH, HOPE and LOVE are set in small spaced capitals with dot separators along the base. The linework is bold and even, with no shading, and the composition is centred on a plain white background.

Cross Heartbeat Heart Faith Hope Love Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The machine above bed four had been drawing the same wobbling line since ten past two, and Ruth Pengelly had stopped expecting it to change. Outside, the sea was throwing gravel at the windows of Saltcombe Cottage Hospital. Old Alf Dunning lay with his hands folded on the blanket like a man waiting for a bus he no longer believed in.

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Ruth had been night sister on that ward for nineteen years and had learnt that the paper trailing from these machines came off in long folds that could be read like a fishing log. She tore off a length and smoothed it on the desk. A tall peak, a dip, a small hitch, then a rise that looked, if you were tired enough, like a cross being planted in wet sand.

Alf woke at four and asked for his tea with two sugars, which she was not supposed to give him. She gave him the tea anyway. He told her about the Mary Ann Dodds, the lifeboat his father had rowed in before the war, and how the crew once turned back for a boy they could not see, only hear. 'You keep listening for the thing that matters,' he said, 'and it keeps coming back.'

By first light the trace had settled into its ordinary rise and fall. Ruth took a pen and, on a spare sheet, drew the line again beside the paper trail, then curved it down at the end into an open heart. Alf was asleep with his mouth open. She pinned the sheet above the desk where the morning shift would find it, and the pulse on the screen kept going, steady, as if nobody had asked it to.