Black line drawing design of a cross and heartbeat line that becomes a heart, with the words Faith, Hope and Love beneath it.

Cross, heartbeat and heart with Faith Hope Love

Black and grey · Flash

A black line design shows a Latin cross on the left, joined to a heartbeat trace that rises and falls before forming an open heart on the right. The words Faith, Hope and Love sit in a single row below, separated by small dots, in a clean sans serif with a few larger initial capitals. The image is a plain black on white drawing with no shading, and the composition is centred and horizontal.

Cross Heartbeat Heart Faith Hope Love Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourself nearer the stove, because the wind off Scarrow Head doesn't care who's listening. My grandmother kept the light there for thirty-one years, and she never once let the lamp go dark between sundown and the first grey. Her husband, Tom Gillespie, had drowned the winter before she took the post, and the man from the Board came out with the papers and asked whether she'd rather a lad from the town did the nights. She told him the lamp had never needed a lad.

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What she did have was a ledger with a cracked spine and a pencil she sharpened with a bread knife. Every hour she wrote the time, the wind and the state of the sea, and she drew the water the way the old keepers did, a wavering line up and down the squared paper. Some nights that line jumped like a pulse under a finger. On those nights she'd stop, stand at the rail, and count the flashes aloud until the rhythm settled. Faith, she said, was only counting on the next flash coming when the one before had gone.

In the spring of her ninth year, a trawler called the Marian Rose came in too close to the Teeth, and her engine quit. Grandmother saw the boat's lamp swing wrong on the water and didn't wait for the telephone to ring. She sounded the fog bell, fired the rockets, and drew the line in the ledger while she worked, because that was how she kept her hands steady. Three men came off that boat. She wrote their names beside the line like someone signing a register at a wedding.

Hope, she told me, was the stubborn part, the bit that keeps you climbing a hundred and four steps with a paraffin can when your knees have given up. And love was the ledger itself, every hour of it, written for people she would never meet. When they found her in the lamp room at the end, the pencil was still in her fingers, and the last line she'd drawn ran straight and level, the way a sea goes flat once the storm has spent itself. Mind the stove now. The kettle's on.