Black ink drawing of a cross with the word faith in cursive script running down the upright, sketched on lined paper, a fine line lettering design.

Faith script across a cross

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A thin black ink design shows a plain cross with the word faith written in joined cursive script running vertically along the upright. The linework is even and fine, with no shading. The design sits on yellow lined paper, photographed in warm light with the paper edges and ruled lines visible.

Fine line Lettering Cross Faith Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourselves down by the stove and mind the kettle. The Constance was a working boat, seventy foot of black iron, and her master was a man called Abel Crane who carried coal from Stoke to London and never once in forty years was late to a lock. He kept a notebook for it. Every trip he ruled fresh lines across the first page with a brass rule, drew a plain cross down the middle the way a surveyor marks a plot, and wrote one word up the upright in his joined-up hand. Faith. Ask him why and he'd say his mother told him a man who can't spell his own trust will end up in the cut.

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Then came the hard winter the Grand Union froze at Hatton. The Constance sat fast in the ice below the top lock with her hold full, and the cook's boy, young Tom Pardoe, was out on the towpath with a line. The ice gave under him with a crack like a dropped plate. Abel was in the water to his chest before anyone shouted, hooking the lad's collar with the boathook and hauling until his arms gave out. They came over the gunwale together, blue and cursing, and the notebook was in Abel's coat, soaked to pulp.

Next morning he dried it page by page on the stove door. The ink had run everywhere except where he had pressed hardest. The cross had gone to a grey smudge, but the word stood up the middle as sharp as the day he wrote it, every letter joined, the f looping down like a rope thrown to somebody who has gone under.

So that's what he kept, you see. Not the coal, not the lock times. The word, and the place he'd pressed. Tom Pardoe grew up to be a lock-keeper himself, and he never once went out on ice without a line tied round his waist. Now, off to bed, the pair of you.