Black script tattoo reading Walk by faith and Not by sight, with swirls and a small flourish across the top of a foot.

Walk by faith quote with swirls on a foot

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a black script tattoo on the top of a foot, reading Walk by faith on the upper line and Not by sight on the lower line. Curling scrollwork and a small flourish frame the lettering, and the thin, even linework is in solid black ink. The lettering runs diagonally from the toes towards the ankle against a light, neutral background.

Lettering Other Script Quote Swirl Flourish Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The roads of the Low Marches had gone to nettle and bog long before anyone thought to mend them, and the signposts had rusted to nothing. When Tobin Garrow came of age, his grandmother Ysolde gave him a lantern with a cracked glass, a goat-hide satchel and one piece of advice. "Walk by faith, not by sight," she said, tapping the back of his hand where her own old ink had faded to a grey blur. "The fog takes the eyes first. Keep your feet on what you know."

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He laughed at her, the way boys do, and set off east towards the salt flats of Penhallow, where a trader was said to pay silver for clean water. The fog came up off the marsh on the second evening, thick as wool, and he could not see his own boots. He sat on a stone and cursed the lantern, which only lit the mist into a wall. Then he remembered her hand and the steady pace she had taught him around the goat pen when he was small: count the steps, keep the left foot where the ground is firm.

So he counted. Forty steps, then a slow turn where the ground softened, then a bank of reeds he knew from the tales his mother used to tell. Somewhere ahead a bell rang, slow and out of time, and he followed it through the grey until his boots found the causeway planks that had been laid by people long dead. A woman with silver hair stood at the far end holding a second lantern, and she was not surprised to see him.

"You came by the sound," she said. "Most come by the light, and the light lies." Tobin understood then why his grandmother had chosen those words. She had walked this way before him, seeing nothing, and so had the people who laid the planks. He pressed his palm flat against his thigh, feeling the coarse cloth of his trousers, and said nothing at all, because for once the road had told him exactly where he stood.