Black and white photo of two arms showing matching fine line script tattoos reading Ohana on the upper arm.

Matching Ohana script on upper arms

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

Two arms are shown side by side, each with the word Ohana written in thin, single-line script on the upper arm. The linework is fine and even, with no shading, and the lettering sits clearly against the skin. The photograph is black and white, and the background includes a light wall and part of a patterned top.

Fine line Lettering Upper arm Ohana Script Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The letter came on the Tuesday boat, folded twice and smelling of diesel and oranges, which was how Ruth knew her sister had got as far as Honolulu before she remembered to write. Dorrie had never been one for proper beginnings. She wrote the way she talked, skipping across the page with a pencil stub, and Ruth had to tilt the paper to the lamp to read through the creases.

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Dorrie had met a stevedore called Keoni on the quay, a man with a laugh like a dropped tray, who had taught her a word. Ohana, she wrote, underlined three times. It means family, he told her, and then he told her the rest, which Dorrie copied out with care: family is the place where nobody gets left behind or forgotten. She said it was the only word she had heard all year that didn't need translating into something smaller.

Ruth read it twice at the kitchen table while the kettle went cold. Then she took the chalk from the drawer where her father kept the net twine, and walked down to the harbour before the lunch whistle. The wall by the slipway was grey with salt and gull muck, but it took the chalk well enough. She wrote the word in letters as tall as her arm, round and leaning, the way Dorrie's hand had always leaned.

By teatime the tide had licked most of it away. Ruth went down the next morning with a fresh stub and wrote it again, and the morning after that, until the men coming in across the grey water could read it from the mouth of the bay and knew, before anything else, that someone on the land was keeping count.