Close view of a small black fine line script tattoo reading Smile on the side of a woman's upper arm, with her shoulder and long hair visible.

Fine line script word on upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman is photographed from behind and to the side, with her face out of frame. A small single-word script tattoo reading Smile sits on the side of her upper arm, below the shoulder. The thin black linework is delicate and even, and the plain white skin and soft, muted background keep the focus on the tattoo.

Fine line Lettering Upper arm Smile Script Word Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fourth letter of the morning was the hardest, because the woman dictating it would not say what she wanted it to say. She sat on the quay steps at Ostia with a fishmonger's basket between her feet, turning her wedding ring round and round while I waited with reed and ink on the wet stone.

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Tell him the barley is in, she said at last. Tell him the roof held through the south wind. Then she stopped and stared at the harbour water for so long that the gulls came down to see whether she had dropped bread. Put the last word small, she said. Small as a tally mark. Smile.

I asked whether she meant the word or the thing it stood for. Both, she said. A man who runs grain from Ostia to Gades needs something he can carry in his head when the sky turns the colour of old iron, and he will not be able to carry a whole sentence.

I wrote it in the cramped hand I keep for contracts, each letter thin as a hair, the S curling back on itself like a fern unrolling. It took the width of my smallest finger. She paid two sestertii, asked me to read it back, then made me read it again with her eyes closed. In spring a boy brought a reply to my stall, folded tight and smelling of tar. Under her words, in her husband's clumsy capitals, someone had gone over my little word again and again until the ink pooled, and beside it he had drawn a crooked smile of his own.