Black and white photo of the word agape in fine line script with a small cross above it, on the inner forearm near the wrist.

Agape script and cross on a wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo reads the word agape in a loose, handwritten script, with a small cross placed above and to the right of the final letters. The linework is thin and even in solid black ink, with a slightly heavier stroke on the descenders of the g and p. The photograph is greyscale and shows the design centred on a pale wrist, with the skin texture softly visible around it.

Lettering Fine line Forearm Script Cross Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The band had packed up before Mrs Cawley found her glasses, so we finished the last waltz in the cloakroom, the wireless on the coat hooks crackling Glenn Miller through the static. Eileen kept her hand flat on my shoulder the way she did when she was deciding something.

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She carried a hymn book in her handbag with a pencil stub she sharpened with her teeth. On the endpaper she had written the Greek word her father used to preach from, agape, and underlined it twice. "It isn't the love you fall into," she said. "It's the kind you keep choosing when there's nothing in it for you." I said something clumsy about the rain on the Calder. She laughed, took my shirt cuff in her fingers, and wrote the word on the linen with her pencil, pressing hard, then drew a small cross above the last letters like a full stop that had changed its mind.

The pencil wouldn't wash out, and I wore that cuff until my mother made me take it off for the mangle. By then I had the shape of the word memorised, the g dipping down like someone reaching for a dropped glove, the p stroke thickening where the nib had rested longer.

Eileen left for Leeds in March with a typing certificate and no forwarding address. The letter came in April, folded around a pressed sprig of hawthorn. One word, no name, and a cross beside it. I still keep it in that hymn book, and I still check the cuffs of my good shirts before I wear them.