Black lettering tattoo of the Greek word Φιλία on the side ribs, shown with a teal top lifted beside it.

Greek word philia on the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of the Greek word Φιλία in black ink on the side of the torso, just below a leopard print bra band. The letters are in a flowing, fairly thin script with solid, even linework and no shading. The skin tone is pale and the teal fabric at the edges frames the word against the lighter skin, with the tattoo placed centrally.

Lettering Ribs Script Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cook's boy on the Marisol has been sick since Madeira, and you are the one who holds the bucket for him, because nobody else on the watch will go below to the fo'c'sle with the stink of the bilge. Ioannis, a lad from Syros with salt already in his eyebrows, says the word for friend is the only thing he can keep down. You ask him to say it again. He gives it to you in the lilt of his island, philia, and you repeat it back until the bosun roars at you both to stop chanting like monks.

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Three weeks past the Cape the ship rolls into a squall that takes the jib and half the starboard rail. Ioannis goes up the ratlines in the dark with you right behind him, the canvas cracking like rifle fire above your heads. Neither of you speaks of it afterward. You simply pass the tin of his mother's rusks across the mess table, and he pushes the last one back to you without looking up from his plate.

At Montevideo the Marisol pays off. He signs on to a coaster bound for home, and you stay aboard for the return run to Liverpool. On the quay he presses a scrap of paper into your palm, the word written in soft pencil, the letters leaning the way his mother's hand must have leaned. He says it means what the two of you have been all voyage without needing a name for. You fold the paper into your sea chest beside a sextant you never learned to use.

Years later, in a rented room above a chip shop in Hull, you hold that paper flat under your palm while the kettle goes cold on the ring, and the gulls wheel over the dock as if they still have somewhere to be.