Black and white photo of a woman's bare back showing a fine line Greek lettering tattoo running vertically down the centre of the spine.

Greek lettering down the spine

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with her hair in a loose bun is photographed from behind, showing a vertical line of Greek lettering running down the centre of her spine. The letters are set in a clean, thin black linework with a uniform weight and even spacing. The photograph is black and white, with a plain grey wall behind and her bra straps and lace bra visible at the lower back.

Fine line Lettering Back Lettering Spine Text Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Stavros had been told the cold would kill the ink before the scribes did, so he kept the pen warm in his armpit between lines. The copying room at Agios Lazaros faced north over the water, and the wind found every gap in the shutters. He was twenty-three, and the abbot had given him the last column of the Psalter because his hand was the steadiest in the house.

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The column was narrow. Each letter had to stand upright above the one before it, with no slope and no flourish, so that a reader could drop his eye straight down the page like a plumb line. Stavros ruled the guide with a bone stylus and worked from the top. Halfway down he stopped, because the line he was copying was not from the Psalter at all. It was a sentence Father Ioannis had scratched on the back of an icon board years before and then painted over, and the brothers said he had asked that it be kept.

When the last letter was dry, Stavros took the page to the abbot. The old man held it close to the lamp, traced the column with a knuckle, and said nothing for a long time. Then he asked whether the line would still run true if the parchment were rolled. Stavros said it would. "Then it is finished," the abbot said, and handed the page back, and Stavros saw that he had been crying a little, the way old men do when the wind is strong.