Black Arabic script lettering tattooed along the side of the ribs, with a hand resting over it and a jewelled ring.

Arabic script tattoo on the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a line of Arabic script tattooed horizontally across the side of the torso, in a dark ink that looks blue-black. The lettering is crisp and evenly weighted, with solid strokes and little visible shading. A hand with coral nail polish and a sparkly gold ring rests across the lower part of the frame, and the background is softly out of focus.

Lettering Ribs Arabic script Lettering Text Hand Ring Skin

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lamp is kinder to tired faces. Back when the trams still rattled down the Street of Brass Lamps, there was a ballroom above a tailor's shop called the Sultana, and every Thursday its bandleader, Fathi Zaidan, hired a singer named Nadia Haddad, who could hold a note until the glasses rang. Fathi was a careful man. He kept his terms in a ledger, paid on the first of the month, and never once touched her hand except to lead her through a turn.

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One Thursday in the autumn of the rains, a rich man from the port sent a note up the stairs with a silver coin folded inside it. It offered Nadia a house on the hill and a car with a driver, and asked only that she stop singing for Fathi. She read it twice, then copied the words onto the back of a programme in her neat hand and gave it to him with the coin. He read it and laughed so loudly the drummer missed a beat.

"Terms," he said, and took out his pen. Beneath the rich man's offer he wrote, pressing hard enough to tear the paper, the words that had sat in his ledger for three years: not on any terms but love. Then he tore the programme in half, kept the half with his writing, and handed her the other with the coin pressed into its crease.

Nobody knows whether she married him. The tailor downstairs will tell you she did, and that they danced every Thursday until the building was pulled down. He still hums the bassline when he measures a sleeve, and he says the ink on that scrap never faded, not even in the damp.