Black script lettering reading Live by faith, not by sight runs across the nape of the neck, just behind the ear.

Live by faith script on the neck

Lettering · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a black script quote, reading Live by faith, not by sight, tattooed across the back of the neck and tapering towards the hairline. The lettering uses a flowing, joined script with smooth, even linework and soft grey shading in the letter strokes. The plain skin tone and the hair around the nape keep the focus on the tattoo, with a small stud earring visible at the edge of the frame.

Lettering Neck Quote Script Text Faith

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lifeboat men wanted their words in gold leaf above the slipway door, and Mr Abney sent me up the ladder because my hand was steadier than his. I had the brushes laid out on a chair and the size gone tacky in the pot, and the wind off the North Sea rattled the shutters like it had a grievance. Mr Abney stood below with his cap in his fists and told me the phrase twice. Live by faith, not by sight. He said it the way a man repeats something a minister told him and does not quite believe.

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I was seventeen and could not have told you what faith looked like on a lifeboat crew. I only knew the letters had to join at the loops, the way my mother taught me to join a reply on the back of a postcard. I began with the capital L, a long swing down and a curl at the foot, and worked along the board without measuring twice. The gold took the lamplight. When the squall came in I kept my eyes on the wet line and my brush moving, because a wobble in the stroke would show from the harbour.

Two nights later the maroon went up off the Scar. Mr Abney's son was in the crew, and I stood at the bottom of the slipway with my apron still on and watched the lamps bobbing out past the pier head. I could not see the boat once it cleared the light. I stood there a long time anyway, reciting the line under my breath, the way you hum to keep the nerves down.

They came back at first light, all of them, cold and grinning with the tide still in their boots. Mr Abney looked up at the board, read it through once, and took his cap off to me. Nobody spoke about sight. The gold had held, and so had the men.