Fine line black script tattoo reading Agape across the side ribs of a torso.

Agape script on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a single word, Agape, written in thin, flowing cursive across the side of the ribcage. The linework is fine and even, in dark ink that reads as black. The torso fills most of the frame, with a dark top above and a plaid waistband below, against a plain pale wall.

Fine line Lettering Ribs Script Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lock keeper at Hatton Wharf has stopped waving at you, which you take as a sign the cold has got into everybody. You steer the Marigold into the chamber with the tiller braced against your hip, and the water drops away under the hull with a long sigh, like a man setting down a sack he has carried too far. Your brother is on the towpath with the windlass, swearing at the gate paddles in the soft Midlands voice he gets when he is frightened. You know the word he is trying not to say. He has been trying not to say it since Christmas.

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Your mother kept a notebook in the galley drawer, the marbled kind, and in it she wrote words she liked in her slanting hand. Agape was one of them. She told you it was the Greek word for the love that asks for nothing, the sort a stranger gives a drowning child, and you thought it sounded like a sneeze until she made you say it properly. Ah-GAH-pay. She wrote it on the inside of the cupboard door above the tea caddy so she would see it every morning.

When the boat reached the basin at Braunston you found the notebook under the bunk, its spine cracked, and you read every page by torchlight while your brother slept off the cold. There was no entry for the day she left. There was only the word, written again and again, each time a little smaller, as if she had been trying to fit it into less and less space until it could go anywhere with her. You closed the book and went up on deck. The water was black and still. You untied the mooring line and let the boat drift out on its own.