Fine line black tattoo on a wrist showing an infinity symbol, three birds in flight and the word faith with heb 11:1 written beside it.

Infinity symbol with birds and faith script

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of a small tattoo on the wrist. An infinity symbol is drawn in thin, even black linework, with the word faith in cursive script running through its right loop and the smaller text heb 11:1 beneath it. Three small bird silhouettes fly above the left loop, and the plain background is out of focus.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Infinity symbol Bird Faith Script Text Wrist

Find an artist for this

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

Every August my father stood at the foot of the keep at Haverlow and counted the swifts as they screamed over the broken walls. He always came up one short. He said the missing bird had gone ahead to find the sea and would turn up when it was ready, and he wrote the count in the ledger in pencil so he could rub it out if he was wrong. I was fourteen that summer and sold tickets from the gatehouse, which meant I heard the count every evening and never once believed it.

Keep reading

The chapel had lost its roof in a storm before my grandfather was born, so the altar sat open to the weather. Dad had pinned a card to the gatehouse door that said Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, and someone had written underneath in biro that it was a daft thing to put on a door. Dad left it there. He said a card was a kind of roof, and nobody argued with him, not even the council man who came to measure the stonework and went away shaking his head.

On the last Thursday of the month I climbed the spiral stair to fetch the long ladder from the chapel store. Halfway up I found a mortar joint cracked open, and beside it a loop scratched into the stone, a figure eight lying on its side, worn so faint I only saw it because the evening light came in low. Above it a single swift was circling the empty window alone, going round and round the same shape as if it had lost the way out.

I went down and told my father. He didn't look up from the ledger. He stood, shaded his eyes and watched the bird come round again, and again, until it dropped past the wall and went south with the rest. He counted to eleven and drew the pencil line through the blank. Then, very quietly, he wrote twelve.