Black ink drawing of the word faith in fine handwritten script, crossed by a single vertical line, shown as a tattoo design on paper.

Faith script with a vertical cross line

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A handwritten word faith in flowing black script is drawn across the upper middle of the image, with a long vertical line running above and below it to form a cross shape. The linework is thin and even, with no shading, and the design is drawn in dark ink on a pale, textured paper background. The composition is centred and the word sits slightly above the midpoint of the vertical line.

Lettering Fine line Faith Script Cross Word Line

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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 booth at the crossing smells of cold coffee and printer toner, and the officer holds your folded letter up to the strip light as though the ink might be hiding something. You keep your hands flat on the counter. The page is from your aunt Maud, written in her slanting pencil on the back of a seed catalogue. It says only what she always said when she left the house: keep the kettle off, water the fig, and faith, underlined twice, with a long stroke running straight through the middle of the word from top to bottom.

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"What's this?" he asks, tapping the stroke above the letters.

"A cross, I suppose. She drew one on everything she wanted finished."

He reads the word aloud, slowly, the way people read a language learned from a phrasebook. Behind him a lorry door bangs shut and a child asks why the flags are flapping. The queue shifts its weight. Somewhere a radio plays a song you half remember from the car she drove, the one with the broken indicator she never fixed, because she said it kept her honest about turning.

He doesn't stamp it. He holds the page against the light and the ink goes thin and grey, the vertical line running clean through the paper from edge to edge, the word sitting in it like a bird on a wire. Then he slides the letter back under the glass and nods you through, and the fig, you think, will just have to take its chances.