Black ink tattoo of the word faith in script inside an outlined fish shape, placed on the lower back above the waistband of blue jeans.

Faith script inside a fish outline on the lower back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows the word faith written in flowing black script inside the outline of a fish, a shape often called an ichthys. The linework is bold and even, with solid black ink and no shading or colour. It sits horizontally across smooth skin at the lower back, just above the top of a pair of blue denim jeans.

Lettering Back Fish Faith Script

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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

The lamp is smoking again, and the man at the cistern door has already counted your footsteps twice. You keep your hood up and your hands busy with the dripping nets, because Marcus the salter likes to see a girl working. Behind the stacked amphorae, the wall of the wine store is still wet from the morning's scrubbing, and it is there you pressed the wooden stylus last night, drawing the long curve of a fish with a single stroke, the way your grandmother taught you on the quay at Ostia.

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Your cousin Demas wanted a bigger sign, something with a cross or a name. You told him the fish was enough. Anyone who knew to look would see the arc and the crossing line and understand, and anyone who didn't would only see a fish, and a fish is a thing a dock labourer is allowed to draw. Inside its belly you wrote the word the elders say over bread: faith. You wrote it slowly, letters looping into one another like a line of tied knots, because a word you can't read at a glance is harder to scrape away.

Before dawn the soldiers came down the steps with torches, but they only kicked over the baskets and laughed at the eel-smell. They never looked at the wall. Demas was taken to the magistrate and let go by noon, shoulders bruised, and he said nothing to you about the fish. You understood that he had read it, and that was the whole conversation.

Now you stand where the light from the grating falls across the stone, and the word is still there, black as soot, a little blurred where the damp has crept in. You rub the dust from your fingers and step out into the market, where a stranger buying mackerel glances at your wrist, and you nod once, the way you nod to the one person who knows what the curve means.