Black Greek key armband tattoo wrapped around an upper arm, with Greek lettering set between two bands.

Greek key armband with Greek text on upper arm

Geometric · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a black armband tattoo wrapping around an upper arm. Two bands of solid black Greek key, or meander, pattern frame a line of Greek lettering in a clean, thin serif style. The ink is fully black and grey, and the tattoo fills the frame against a dark background.

Geometric Lettering Upper arm Armband

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, and mind the urn. It's older than your mortgages. Frank the caretaker swears it's the same urn that boiled for the 1979 leavers' do, and I'm not going to argue with a man who still holds the keys.

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Some of you will remember Mr Ashdown, Classics, room six, every Monday at quarter past nine. He'd chalk three words across the top of the board in Greek letters, read them out like a hymn, then turn round to thirty fourteen-year-olds who only wanted to talk about the Leeds game. Gnothi seauton. Know yourself. Down the margin he drew that border, square spirals joined end to end, the key that never stops. He said it was a road that looped back on itself, so you always arrived where you'd started, and the trick was noticing you'd arrived.

Billy Crane sat at the back and thought it was the daftest thing he'd ever heard. But he copied that border into the front of his exercise book, every corner and every square, and when Ashdown walked past he'd ask, sir, is it a maze or a cage? And Ashdown would say, that depends whether you're looking for the way out.

Mrs Ashdown gave me a box of his old marking last week. Tucked inside Billy's exercise book, in red ink, one line: You know more than you think, Crane. Now go and find out what. Well. Somebody fetch the boy a cup of tea, and mind the urn.