Black script Greek lettering reading χάρις tattooed on the wrist and forearm, with a blurred green background.

Greek word in script on the wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a single Greek word, written in bold black script lettering with a stroke over the middle letter, tattooed on the wrist and lower forearm. The ink is solid black with no grey shading, and the line work is clean and even. The word is centred on the skin, with soft-focus greenery and pink flowers behind it.

Lettering Forearm Word Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The third coat of paint was still tacky when Eleni Vasou climbed the ladder to add the stroke over the middle letter, because her father had always said a word on a machine should be correct even where nobody thought to look. The Waltzer cars at Ramsgate were the last of the old set, their gilt scrolls chipped by years of Kent sea wind, and the lettering across the canopy spelled out χάρις in the shapes her grandmother had copied from a church bulletin in Piraeus.

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Charis, her father had told her on the back step of the caravan, is what you get for nothing and what you hand on without counting. He said it in the same patient, slightly suspicious voice he used for the generator, and then he went out to the ticket hut and sold four hundred pounds of rides on a bank holiday Monday without mentioning the word again.

On the Friday the wind came in off the Channel, and Mr Pryce, who owned the rides, sent a boy up with a pot of black to cover the Greek. "Nobody reads it," he said. "They take it for a cough sweet." Eleni sat on the top rung with the brush across her knee and said nothing. When the boy went off to fetch her a cup of tea, she painted the accent back in, slow and even, over the smear he had only half dragged across.

That evening the lights came up one bank at a time along the front, and a woman in a green headscarf stopped at the foot of the ladder to ask what the word said. Eleni told her. The woman nodded as if that settled a bill, bought a strip of tickets she did not need, and walked off towards the pier with the paper folded in her fist, while the paint dried gold on the canopy above the empty car.