Black lettering tattoo in Devanagari script across the upper arm, shown in a close photograph of the skin.

Devanagari script on upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A bold black Devanagari script tattoo runs horizontally across the outer upper arm, with thick, smooth strokes and a curved hooked flourish at the left. The ink is solid black with clean edges and a slightly soft, uniform fill. The photo is taken close up against a dark sleeve, with the tattoo centred in the frame.

Lettering Upper arm Script Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Anand,

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Mother has stopped asking whether you have eaten. She asks instead whether the trains out of Amritsar still smell of coal, which she heard from the Mishras, and I told her it does not matter what the trains smell like, you are the one who has to ride them. She laughed at that, which I had not heard her do in months.

You will want the news of the shop first, so here it is. The tailor on Kiln Lane has finally painted over his sign, and the new one says nothing but his name. Mr Pathak came to the house on Sunday with a cake nobody wanted and asked after you twice. I did not tell him you had written only one letter in eight months. I said the post is slow between here and Bradford, which is true.

Something else. Grandfather's tin box is open on the kitchen table now, and inside is the paper you copied for him when you were nine, the word you drew with his brass pen so the strokes went thick at the bottom. अभय. Without fear. I read it aloud to the empty room and felt foolish, then I did not. Tell me you still have some of that nerve. Tell me the mill foreman has not frightened you into silence.

Write back soon. I will keep the lamp lit in the window, as Mother insists, though it costs us a shilling a week.

Your loving sister, Sunita