Close-up of a black cursive tattoo reading faith on skin, with soft grey shading around the final letters.

Faith in cursive script

Lettering · Black and grey · Photo

A close-up of the word faith written in flowing cursive script in black ink. The letters have bold, even strokes with tapering loops, and grey shading sits behind the final letters, softening the edge of the word. The image is a tight crop on the skin with no colour ink and a plain, pale background.

Lettering Faith Script Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, love, and mind the wet chair, it's never dry since the spring tide. You'll want the whole of it, not the bit they print in the guidebook. Arthur Quayle came to us the autumn the herring boats stopped going out past the Dutchman's Rock, and he took the back room over the scullery because it had the window on the harbour. He was a sign-painter by trade, though there were no shopfronts left in Hollin Bay that needed painting. So he painted the boards instead.

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Every morning he went down to the pier with his brushes and a tin of black enamel and lettered the names of the drowned men on the lifeboat shed, one name a day, in that long looping hand the grammar school used to teach. Nobody asked him to. Ada Pinch brought him tea in a jam jar and he never once drank it hot. When the paint wouldn't hold in the salt wind he began pencilling the words first, then shading the tails of the letters with a grey wash so the rain would not wear them off before spring. He said a word wanted its last letters soft, so anyone coming home in the fog could still read it.

The word he wrote most was faith. He wrote it on the shed, on the slipway rail, on the inside of the chapel door where the candles caught it. Every time the same tall f leaning out over the sea as if it was looking for something it had dropped. Then one February the boats were late, the fog came in like wet wool, and Ada stood at the window with the kettle screaming behind her, counting the lights coming round the point. Eleven. Then twelve. She told me later she could just make out the word on the shed from the end of the pier, grey and blurred at the tail, and she followed it home.

Arthur died in the summer. The shed still says faith, though the paint has gone pale at the ending. The council wanted it scraped. Ada wouldn't have it. Go on, have a look before you go out, it's the last thing on the pier you can read from the boat.