God is greater than the highs and lows

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A black line design on a plain white background showing the stylised symbols G, a right-pointing angle bracket, an upward angle and V, above a horizontal rule. Beneath the rule, the words God is greater than the highs and lows are set in a small italic serif typeface. The composition is centred with generous white space, and the linework is thin and even throughout.

Lettering Quote Text Symbol

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Mattie Coyle kept the tide book at Skerrin Point because the keeper before her had kept it, and his father before that. Every morning she walked down the wet steps with a stick of chalk and wrote the high water and the low water in two columns. She marked the high with a small upward stroke and the low with a small downward one, and she never once wrote a figure she had not seen with her own eyes.

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The winter the Marrow went down, the sea came up the steps further than anyone living had seen it come. Men from the mainland climbed out to the light and asked what the book said, and she read them the numbers. Then they asked what God made of all that rising and falling. Mattie did not preach at them. She drew a straight line across the page, the way the surveyors drew a datum, and above it she wrote a G, then a bracket pointing away from it, and then the two strokes, one up and one down, sitting underneath.

The men laughed and said that was a sum with no answer. Mattie only nodded and went down to the steps with her chalk. The tide was turning, the water pulling back from the third step, and she wrote the figure for the ebb without looking up.

In the spring the book was found on the lamp room shelf, open at that page, the chalk still pale on the line. Nobody argued with it after that.