Black and grey traditional tattoo of an anatomical heart with the word AGAPE in thin capitals above it, on the lower leg.

Anatomical heart with AGAPE lettering

Traditional · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey anatomical heart with bold outlines, shaded with etched lines across the chambers and vessels. The word AGAPE sits above it in thin capitals, framed by small dot marks. The photograph is taken straight on, filling the frame with the lower leg and plain skin.

Traditional Lettering Calf Anatomical heart Heart Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cool box is the last thing you check, after the seal, the driver's ID and the damp corners of the manifest. Under your torch the ice has gone to grey slush, and in it, wrapped in clean cloth, sits what the paperwork calls a donor organ and your gut recognises before your head does. The label is in careful capitals: a name, a hospital in the north, a time of arrival. Nothing about it looks like a crime, which is exactly why you have spent eleven years learning to look twice.

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The driver, Ruth Abernethy, has been awake since the ferry, and she watches you the way you'd watch a kettle. "Go on," she says. "They'll be waiting on it upstairs." You want to say the form is the form. Instead you hold the torch steady on the lid, where someone has written a single word in marker, faded but legible: AGAPE. It isn't a name. Ruth tells you, without being asked, that it was her sister's word when they were girls, what she said after one of them had done something unforgivable and the other had decided to forgive it anyway.

You initial the form, tick the box marked no concerns and ease the lid down, the way you'd close a door on a sleeping room. Ruth is pulling away before the barrier has finished lifting, her indicator blinking orange in the dark. You stand in the booth and listen to the engine fade up the slip road.

Later, when the shift has thinned to the kettle and the rain, you find yourself reading the word again on the back of your hand, where you wrote it down so you would not lose it.