Black ink tattoo on the ribs of a person in a grey top, showing a heartbeat line that forms a cross and ends in a heart, with the words faith. hope. love. in script beneath.

Heartbeat cross and heart with faith, hope, love

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink tattoo sits on the side of the ribs, showing a heartbeat trace that forms a cross on the left and ends in an outlined heart on the right. Beneath the line, the words faith. hope. love. are written in a flowing script. The ink is solid black with no grey shading, and the design is centred on the skin with a grey top visible above it.

Lettering Ribs Heartbeat Cross Heart Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had been falling on the Saturday market at Holmcastle since before the bells, and Nan Ostle still hadn't sold a single pear. She sat under her awning with a tin cup of tea going cold and listened, as her mother had taught her, for the thing underneath the noise.

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Every person who walked past gave off a sound if you held still enough. The butcher's boy was quick and bright, like a sparrow tapping at a sill. Old Hesketh, who sold eels, had a slow drag to his, as if someone were hauling a rope through mud. Nan had only ever told one customer what she heard, and that had been a mistake, because he went home and never came back to the stall.

Then a girl came in under the awning with a folded map in one hand and no coat on her back. Nan leaned forward. The girl's sound rose and fell like a line drawn on a tally board, a sharp spike, a rest, another spike, and then the long, steady swell that meant she had been loved by somebody who had never once said so out loud.

"Two pears," the girl said, "and tell me what you hear."

Nan gave her the pears for nothing. "Faith, hope and love," she said, "same as the words on the chapel window." The girl laughed, wiped the rain from her eyes, and walked off up the high street with the map folded away, and Nan poured the cold tea into the gutter and found, for the first time that morning, that she wanted a hot one.