Cursive word heart tattoo on the chest

Lettering · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo spells six words in connected cursive script: loyalty, hope, love, family, believe and strength, arranged in a loose heart or circle shape. The ink is solid black with smooth, even strokes, and the lettering sits on warm brown skin under soft, even lighting. The composition is centred and close-cropped, with the words filling most of the frame and dark fabric visible at the lower edge.

Lettering Chest Hope Love Family Believe Strength Word Script Heart

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the time the ferry horn sounded across the bay, you had covered the kitchen table in newspaper and laid out the nib pens your father left behind. Mrs Okonedo from the chandlery wanted the sign above the net loft redone before the regatta, and nobody else in Porthmellow would touch it. You had never lettered anything bigger than a price card. Your father could fill a whole gunwale in copperplate with his tongue between his teeth.

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He had taught you one rule before the boat went missing off Skerrick Point: join the letters, or they will not hold together. Pull the line through and don't lift the pen until the word is finished. So you practised on the back of old tide tables, writing the words he used to say at supper, the ones that kept the house upright after the search boats came back empty. Loyalty, for the crew who stayed with him. Hope, which Mum wrote on every parcel sent to the lifeboat station. Love, family, believe, strength, until the paper went soft under your thumb.

On the last morning the wind came off the water sharp enough to sting, and the paint took slowly on the cold board. You arranged the six words in a loose ring, the way he liked to fold a rope into a heart for the hook, so each word leaned into the next. Your hand shook on the strength and you let it, because he never made a perfect line either.

When the ink dried, you climbed down and stood in the road with Mrs Okonedo. Gulls settled on the rail one by one, as if they had read it too. She tapped the sign with a knuckle and said nothing, which from her was a kind of praise. Then you went home to the kitchen, cleared the newspaper, and wrote your own name at the bottom of the tide table, joined all the way through.