Black ink script reading Phil 4:13 above an infinity symbol with the word strength on a shoulder, in a Lettering style.

Phil 4:13 and infinity strength lettering on a shoulder

Lettering · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows the reference Phil 4:13 in cursive script above a looping infinity symbol, with the word strength in a joined script running through the right loop. The linework is a dark, even ink with slight softness, and the lettering is the clear focus. The photo is taken casually in a vehicle, with a gold chain visible at the left edge and the skin filling most of the frame.

Lettering Shoulder Bible verse Infinity symbol Strength Script

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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

The ring has no end, which is the first thing they teach you at the Meridian yards. Thirty-one kilometres of spinning spoke and tube, and every corridor curves back to where it started. My mother was a loop-line mender before me, and she used to say the ring was the only honest machine ever built, because it never pretended to be going anywhere.

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The fault came in the third month of my first solo shift, a hairline crack in the coolant spine behind Section Nine. Forty families slept on the far side of it. Dorrit, my supervisor, a woman with a voice like a rusted hinge, handed me the patch kit and said nothing. Above every hatch frame on the ring, someone long dead had scratched the old crew's line: all things through the one who gives me strength. I had read it a thousand times without listening.

Eleven hours in a suit that smelled of burnt sugar. The seal kept slipping, and each time my hands shook I said the line under my breath, and each time I started again from the beginning, the way the ring itself goes round, back to the start with one more turn of the spanner. Somewhere past the ninth hour the words stopped being a prayer and became a rhythm, like a pulse I could borrow.

When the pressure finally held, Dorrit tapped the visor and pointed at the hatch frame beside me. Someone had carved the word strength there, its letters drawn out and looped back on themselves, as if the author had not wanted to let go of the word. I asked her who had done it. She shrugged and said it was carved on fumes, by someone with no spare breath, and then she went off to put the kettle on.