Black ink tattoo of a cross drawn as a heartbeat line that flows into a heart outline, with the words Faith, Hope, Love beneath, on the side of the ribs.

Heartbeat cross and heart with Faith Hope Love

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a cross drawn as an ECG heartbeat trace that continues into an outlined heart on the right. The words FAITH, HOPE and LOVE are written in small capitals with dot separators along the bottom edge. It is done in solid black linework with no shading or colour, and it sits diagonally across bare skin at the side of the torso.

Ribs Cross Heartbeat Heart Text Faith Hope Love

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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

You learn the galley by its noises before you learn its rules. The extractor fan coughs twice before it catches, the reefer hums beneath the deck plates, and somewhere forward a bosun swears at a winch in Portuguese. Tonight Iwona stands at the steel bench with a cleaver, sliding sliced onions into a tray, and she does not look up when you come in soaked from the gangway. She pushes a mug of stewed tea across the bench with two fingers, the way she has done every watch since Rotterdam.

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Forward, in the sick bay, the monitor bolted to the bulkhead keeps its own time. Tomasz sleeps under its green line, and every few seconds the trace lifts and drops like someone climbing stairs in the dark. Iwona watches it through the porthole in the galley door whenever she thinks nobody is looking. Last night she asked you to print the strip for her, and you fed the long paper out of the machine while the ship rolled under your boots.

She taped the strip to the fridge door beside the duty roster. Then she took a marker from the drawer and traced a heart onto the last peak, the line doubling back on itself and curling into a point. Beneath the peaks she wrote three words in capitals, separated by small dots, the way she labels her stock. FAITH. HOPE. LOVE. You asked her what they were for. She said they were the only three things on the inventory that never ran out, and went back to her onions, the knife tapping steady as a pulse.