Black Arabic script lettering tattoo running down the middle of a woman's back, seen from behind in a black open-back top.

Arabic script tattoo down a back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman seen from behind wears a black open-back top, showing a column of black Arabic script tattoo across the middle of her back. The lettering is in a flowing script with uneven strokes and is set against her skin. The background includes a green polka-dot curtain and a clothes rack with striped garments, and the lighting is warm and indoors.

Lettering Back Arabic script Calligraphy Text Woman

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The 6.12 to Carlisle is running twenty minutes late, and the announcer apologises in the voice of someone who has never once been apologised to. You stand under the canopy with your rucksack between your feet and the timetable folded small in your palm. On the back, in your grandmother's hand, a line of ink that thins where the pen gave out. She wrote it the week before the hospital, while you were still arguing with her about the kettle.

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The phrase is one she said at every station they ever met at, as if it were a greeting. Love yourself first, habibti, then everyone else gets the good leftovers. You laughed then. You are not laughing now, though the rain has started on the glass roof, a drum with no rhythm. Two boys with a football argue about a penalty. A woman with a pram asks whether this is the right platform, and you tell her yes, and she thanks you as if you have done more than read a board.

Beyond the signal box the lights of the approaching train swing round the bend. Your return ticket is in your coat, the cheap kind that expires on a Sunday. You think of the queue at the café behind you, where you would normally stand aside for the man with the bad cough. Instead you step back through the doors, order a flat white you actually want, and carry it to the bench with the chipped armrest.

When the train pulls out you are still sitting there, the cup warm between your hands and the timetable open on your knee. You trace the ink with your thumb. The letters lean into each other like people on a crowded platform, uneven and stubborn, and you find you can read every one of them. The next train is at twenty past. You let it come.