Black and grey photo of a Hebrew lettering tattoo on the inner forearm, with a bold black wavy line rising to an arrowhead above the text.

Hebrew lettering with a wavy line on the wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey photograph of a tattoo on the inner wrist and forearm. Bold Hebrew lettering sits across the skin, with a thick black wavy line above it that ends in an arrowhead. The image is monochrome, with soft lighting and a plain background of skin and fabric, and a white band sits at the bottom of the frame.

Lettering Forearm Text Line Wave Arrow

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The river rose the spring my father stopped speaking to the miller, and by the second week of rain the whole of Tiberias was counting the marks on the gauge post by the bridge. I was fourteen and paid a penny a day to climb down each dawn and scratch the new height into the stone with a nail, so the men at the inn could argue over it with figures instead of fists.

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Old Yosef Halevi came down on the fifth morning with a pot of black paint and a brush no wider than my finger. He drew a wavering line up the post, sharp as a fishhook, and at its tip he made an arrowhead pointing at the sky. 'Water always climbs like that,' he said, 'and then it has to go somewhere. Write the words beneath it.' He had me copy a phrase from his prayer book, the one that says this too shall pass, letters I had only seen carved over the synagogue door and could not yet read well.

I wrote them slowly, backwards at first, and he laughed and turned the board round for me. The men came down to stare, and the arguments stopped, because nobody wants to fight over a line that is plainly about to fall.

Three days later the crest turned. I went down with my nail and found the mark a hand lower than the one before, the paint under it already grey with silt. Yosef was asleep in the boat shed with his cap over his face. I did not wake him. I only scratched the new number beside his arrow, small, the way he had taught me, and climbed back up to tell the miller the river was going down.