Black ink Ichthys fish tattoo with the word faith in script, sitting on the top of a foot beside pink painted toenails.

Ichthys fish with faith on a foot

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a foot with pink toenail polish showing a small black tattoo of an Ichthys fish outline. The word faith is written in flowing script inside the fish, with clean, even linework and solid black fill. The plain skin tone and soft, neutral background keep the focus on the tattoo.

Lettering Other Fish Faith Script Foot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wind came through the broken east window of Saint Ealdred's the morning Tobias Wren was told to cut the fish. Master Hale had chalked the outline on the lintel the night before, a long curl with a tail flicked like a thumb pressed into wet clay, and he left Tobias to it with a bucket of lime, a mallet and a warning about the weather coming in off the Solway.

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The outline went well enough. Tobias worked the chisel along the chalk with the patience his mother had beaten into him, and by noon the fish lay sunk in the grey sandstone like something that had surfaced and forgotten to leave. Then came the word. Faith was to run through the body in a looping hand, the way the abbey clerks wrote on their charters, and Tobias, who had never learned his letters past his own name, copied it from a scrap of paper pinned to the scaffold. He cut steadily, stroke after stroke, and only when he stepped back to wipe the dust from his eyes did he see that the whole word faced the wrong way, the F bent under the fish's belly like a hook.

Hale came up the ladder slowly, breathing hard, and looked for a long time. "Cut it out," he said at last. "You'll take the fish with it." Tobias began to argue, then stopped, because Hale was smiling the way he did when he had nothing to say that would help. "The stone has held worse than a backwards word," Hale said. "Anyone coming up from the shore will read it right way round. The fish is swimming home."

That evening the rain came in sideways and Tobias sat under the scaffold with his back to the wall, watching the lime wash run down the sandstone. Lamplight from the lane caught the cut edges, and the rain settled in the grooves, darkening them until the letters stood out black and sure. He thought of the boats coming in past the rocks with their eyes on the chapel tower, and of the men who would climb the path reading the word the right way round, and he found he did not mind at all which way it looked from where he had stood.