Black ink drawing of the word trust in flowing handwritten script, with a thin line running out from both sides and the words IN THE LORD in capitals beneath, on a plain white background.

Trust in the Lord script design

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A handwritten script word reading trust sits across the upper centre, with a long, thin flowing line extending to the left and right edges. Below it, the words IN THE LORD are set in small, upright black capitals. The image uses black ink on an off-white background, with no shading and no body part visible, so it reads as a lettering design rather than a photograph of skin.

Lettering

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

The bell on Skerra had been cracked since before my father was born, so when the fog came in off the sound nobody rang it. Instead the chapel warden, old Mrs Gunn, stood at the harbour wall with a hand bell she had bought from a catalogue in Thurso, and she shook it like a woman calling hens.

Keep reading

I was nineteen and sick of hearing about the ferry. My brother Alec had taken the skiff out at dusk to check the creels, and the weather had turned the way it always does out here, all at once, as if someone had drawn a curtain. I stood beside her with my coat buttoned to the throat, counting the seconds between her shakes.

She didn't look at the water. She looked at the chapel door, where someone had painted a word in white on the lintel years ago, the paint gone grey now. Trust, the word said, and a long stroke ran out from it to the left and the right, like a rope nobody had troubled to tie off. My mother used to say the painter had run out of room and simply kept going.

"He knows the way in," Mrs Gunn said, not to me. "Our part is to stand where he can hear the bell."

I wanted to tell her that was a poor sort of faith, standing on a wall shaking brass. But then the small note reached out over the grey, and out of the murk came a bow wave, and then the skiff, low in the water and steady, Alec at the tiller with one hand raised. I found I had been holding my breath since the first shake, and I let it go onto the cold air in a long white line.