Black and grey photograph of the words "cross my heart and hope to die" in cursive lettering tattooed on the upper chest, below the collarbone.

Cross my heart quote on the upper chest

Lettering · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo reads "cross my heart and hope to die" across two lines in a cursive script, set just below the collarbone. The black ink is crisp and even, with the letters sitting slightly off-level along the curve of the chest. The photograph is black and white and shows a dark, loose neckline top framing the skin, with the lettering as the clear focal point.

Lettering Chest Quote Script Word

Find an artist for this

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

The beck had not thawed by the second week of February, and the ice lay white between the alders like a road nobody had mended. Ida Pennock had told her brother Sam that it would hold him, and he had believed her, which was the first mistake of that winter. Their mother was at the lambing pens with the lantern, and the dog was asleep by the range, so nobody saw them go down the bank in their stockinged feet and their father's old boots.

Keep reading

At the bottom of the field, where the ice was thinnest and greenish under the frost, Ida drew a cross over her coat with one cold finger. "Cross my heart," she said. Sam looked at the grey sky and then at the dark water moving beneath the crust. "And hope to die," he said, because that was the proper end of it, and because he was seven and wanted very badly to be trusted with the far bank.

The ice spoke once, a long low note like a door in an empty house, and then it gave. Ida lay flat and reached the crook of the shepherd's stick out to him, and she hauled him up by his collar with her heels dug into the snow. They went home without speaking, dripping and blue, and their mother said nothing at all, only wrapped them in the blanket by the range.

In March the beck ran loud and brown and Sam was allowed back down to it. He never went onto the ice again, and when Ida asked him why, he said he had promised, and that was that. She still kept the cross on her coat for years, and sometimes, when the frost was on the window, she breathed on the glass and wrote the words backwards so she could read them the right way round.