Hand-drawn line sketch of three doves in flight, each carrying one word: faith, hope and love, shown as a tattoo design on pale paper.

Three doves with faith, hope and love

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

Three dove outlines in flight are drawn in dark ink on a pale, textured background. The word faith sits across the top bird's wing, hope across the left bird, and love across the lower bird. The single continuous lines are thin and unshaded, and the composition spreads the birds diagonally across the page.

Fine line Dove Bird Faith Hope Love Wing Lettering

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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

Mind the step, it's slick where the rain gets in. Aye, that's the Marigold you can see tied off at the far wall, the one with the green cabin. Her old skipper painted three birds on the tiller board the spring before the flood, and nobody ever scraped them off, not even when the paint went grey. Folk on the towpath would ask about them and he'd only say they were passengers who hadn't paid yet.

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He had a daughter called Winnie who couldn't sit still. She'd climb the lock gates and swing off the bollards and once went under the hull on a dare and came up laughing with weed in her hair. Her mother had gone off with a fellow from Nottingham years before, so it was only the two of them, the barge and the long grey river between Oxford and the sea. When Winnie turned twelve she stopped laughing for a whole winter, and he didn't know what to say to her, so he sat with her on the roof every evening and drew birds in the condensation on the wheelhouse glass, one after another, until she told him to stop because they looked like pigeons.

The next morning there were three of them on the board, flying in a loose line towards the stern, and she had written a word across each one in her round careful hand. Faith on the top one. Hope on the middle. Love underneath, where the wing dipped down toward the water. He never told her he had only ever been able to draw birds that were leaving. The last one she'd added herself, and it was flying the other way.