Close-up of the word agape tattooed across a finger, with a small red heart in place of the o, in fine lettering on a hand.

Agape lettering on a finger

Lettering · Hand · Mixed · Photo

A hand rests across the frame with the word agape tattooed along the top of one finger. The lettering is thin and neat, with a small red heart replacing the letter o. The ink is mostly dark, with the heart as the only visible colour, and the background is a soft, blurred dark surface.

Lettering Fine line Hand Lettering Word Heart Finger

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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

Mrs Pardoe wanted the word on the chandlery window in Hale Street, gold leaf with a black shadow, and she wanted it spelt exactly as she had written it on the back of a fish receipt. Agape. I asked what it meant. She said it was the kind of love you gave without keeping count, that the Greeks had a word for it because we had let ours wear thin, and she tapped the paper until I agreed to paint it.

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Her one difficulty was the o. She wanted a heart there, small and red, and I said gilt would be neater, but she shook her head and said her Stanley had never been neat a day in his life, so the sign wouldn't be either. I spent a Tuesday on it with a size-two sable, laying the gold, then the shadow, then the red, which I mixed from vermilion and a drop of lake so it would look like something warm had been pressed into the glass. Mrs Pardoe stood on the pavement with her shopping and watched every stroke.

She came back the following Monday with a tin of biscuits and no shopping, and sat on the step while I varnished. Stanley's boat had gone out of Grimsby in February and not come back. She said the sign was for the fishermen's wives who passed the shop, so they would know someone still kept accounts of nothing. She paid in full, in coins, and counted them twice.

The gold was dry by Thursday. On Friday a gull landed on the sill and stared through the glass, and the red heart caught the sun so that from the street the word looked lit from within, the o beating like something alive. Mrs Pardoe never came back to see it. I still walk past on my way to the harbour, and the heart is always the first thing I see.