Back view of a woman with platinum blonde hair and a fine black lettering tattoo running vertically down her upper arm, with a lace-up satin dress.

Fine lettering on upper arm, back view

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with wavy platinum blonde hair is photographed from behind, wearing a mauve satin dress with a lace-up open back. A thin black lettering tattoo runs vertically down her upper arm, in a serif typeface, and its words are small and only partly legible at this size. The soft natural light from a window on the right gives the image a muted, neutral palette.

Lettering Fine line Upper arm Text Word Hair Dress

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift in Garvey House has been broken since March, so I take the stairs with the shopping and a biro in my cardigan pocket. Nine floors is nothing to a woman who set type for thirty years, but my knees have opinions now. The letter came on Tuesday, folded in thirds, with no stamp and no return address, just a line printed in a small grey serif across the top: a phrase I could half-read and not at all trust.

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I laid it on the kitchen table under the lamp and copied the words out by hand, letter by letter, the way my father taught me to check a proof. The first word I knew from the Christmas cards. The rest bent away from me like wet string. I spelled them out slowly, dropping the fada wherever my pen wouldn't follow, and ended up with something close to a sentence about the road, the rain, and not turning back.

Downstairs, Mr Okonjo in the caretaker's room keeps a shelf of dictionaries and a grandson who learnt the language at school in Galway. He squinted at my copy for a long time, then tapped the last line twice. 'It's not a message,' he said. 'It's a line from a song. My mother sang it over the washing.' He hummed four bars, and I realised I knew the tune too, and that whoever printed that letter had wanted me to find it.

Back upstairs the lift still sat dark between floors. I opened the window and let the cold in, and read the whole thing aloud to the empty car park, badly, the way my father would have. Somewhere below, a door banged, and a voice I didn't recognise finished the verse.