Red lip print and red script lettering reading 'Love my smile... Beware of my silence' tattooed on an arm.

Lip print and script lettering on an arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a red lip print on the left, beside two lines of red cursive script reading 'Love my smile...' and 'Beware of my silence'. The lines are fine and even, with the lip print filled in with solid red ink and some soft shading. The photograph is taken close up against a plain, blurred background, with the skin tone and red ink as the main colours.

Lettering Upper arm Lip Script Lettering Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, and mind the brazier, for this is the tale of Ione, who kept the seal ring of the harbour magistrate at Cyzicus. Every letter that left the city went out wearing a red stamp of wax, and every stamp had to be pressed by her own hand, because the magistrate could not read and trusted nobody who could. On the day he hired her he told her to keep her smile for the customers and her opinions for the gods.

Keep reading

The winter the grain ships failed, a courier arrived from the governor of Pergamon with a letter sealed in wax that was not hers. Ione broke it open with her thumbnail while the courier drank in the yard. Inside were orders to starve the lower wharves until the workers came up the hill begging. She read it twice, then pressed her mouth to a fresh cake of wax and lifted it away, a clean crimson kiss, and sealed her own copy with it so that anyone who knew her hand would know the order was false.

The magistrate read the forgery aloud at the wharf gate that very morning, so pleased with himself that he tossed her a coin for the stamp. She smiled at him the way he liked. Then she kept her silence. Three days she said nothing, not to the clerks, not to the sailors, not even when the magistrate demanded to know why the grain carts moved so slowly. On the fourth day the governor's inspectors came down the road, opened the posted copy first, and found a kiss pressed in wax where no clerk of Pergamon would ever put one.

The magistrate went north in chains, and the wharves were fed. Ione kept the seal ring and never again smiled at a man who told her to. For a week afterwards there was still a faint red mark on her mouth where the wax had been, and nobody in Cyzicus had the nerve to tell her to wash it off.