Fine line tattoo on the back showing a teal cross and a blue-to-purple heartbeat line leading to a red heart, above black script reading Faith Hope Love.

Faith Hope Love script with cross and heart

Fine line · Back · Mixed · Photo

The design pairs a teal cross on the left with a heartbeat trace that runs into a red outlined heart on the right. Below it, the words Faith Hope Love are written in black cursive script, with fine, even linework. The colour is soft and slightly blurred across the heartbeat line, which shifts from blue to purple, and the composition is centred on pale, lightly freckled skin.

Fine line Lettering Back Cross Heartbeat Heart Script Faith Hope Love Word

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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

Pull your chairs in closer, the lot of you, and mind the fire, for this one is true or near enough. Eleven days out from Valparaiso, a stoker called Tobias Vane dropped across the coal chute like a sack of wet sand. The ship's doctor was a thin Ulsterman named Halloran, and aboard he carried a brass instrument the owners had bought in Liverpool to impress the insurers.

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Halloran strapped the wires to Vane's chest and ran a long roll of paper through the machine, and the needle drew the heart in blue ink. Every peak was a knock on a door. The men crowded the sick bay doorway with tar on their hands, wanting to read it like tea leaves. The mate swore it looked like a mountain range. The cook said a fence. Halloran said nothing and kept counting under his breath.

Through the night the line wavered, then steadied, then dipped again near dawn. Halloran pinned the strip to the bulkhead, and Chaplain Pryce, who could not hold a tune, came down with his pen and wrote beneath the trace in careful copperplate: Faith, Hope, Love. The galley boy asked him why three words when one would do. Pryce said the sea would take the other two if you let it, so he had written all three.

Vane woke on the fourth day and asked for water, then asked to see the paper. He ran his thumb along the peaks like a man tracing a route home. Still there, then, he said. And that, my friends, is why the Lass's stokers all carried a little teal cross on their shoulders by the time we made Cardiff, with a heartbeat running off it, because that was the only map anyone trusted.