Black line design of angular symbols above a horizontal rule, with the italic words God is greater than the highs and lows, shown as a tattoo design on a white background.

God is greater than the highs and lows lettering

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A black linework tattoo design on a plain white background. Above a thin horizontal rule sits a row of angular geometric symbols, and beneath it two lines of italic serif text read God is greater than the highs and lows. The design uses clean, even strokes in solid black with no shading, centred in the frame.

Lettering Text Symbol Line Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit where I can see you, boy, and don't touch the rail. My grandfather crossed the Minch forty times in a boat with no engine worth the name, and every crossing he kept a slate in his oilskin. On it he drew the sea as he found it: a sharp peak, a sharp trough, a peak again, the way the swell lifted the bow and let it drop. He never drew a wave as a curve. He said curves were for people who had never been seasick.

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The winter he was forty, the Minch took his brother Donal off the Stornoway boat, and nobody found him. My grandfather stopped talking for a month. Then one morning he came down to the harbour with the slate and wrote beneath the peaks the words his own father had taught him: God is greater than the highs and lows. A man might be lifted high and dropped low, he said, but there was something bigger than the lift and the drop, and it held the line of the water steady under him whether he could feel it or not.

The crews laughed at him. A fisherman called Murdo Gillies scratched the words off with his knife one night while the slate lay drying on the thwart. My grandfather simply wrote them again, smaller, with a greater-than sign between the God and the peaks, because the sign pointed the way a compass needle does, and he said that was all a sign was good for.

Murdo drowned the next year, off the same rocks, and his widow sent the slate back to my grandfather with the words still half scratched across it. I have it in the drawer beside you. Read it out loud, go on. The sea never once asked me whether I believed the words. It only ever asked whether I could keep my head up.