Two stacked photos of small black Greek lettering tattoos on the top of a foot, one reading arete and the other agape, cropped at the edge.

Small Greek word tattoos on two feet

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

Two photographs stacked vertically show small Greek words in dark ink on the top of a foot. The upper image shows the word arete in clean, thin lettering, while the lower image shows agape, with its final letter cut off by the frame. The ink is black with slightly soft edges, set against plain skin and a dark, reflective surface.

Lettering Other

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Queen of Ostry wanted her two words cut small, because large letters, she said, were for people who needed telling. I had cut words into marble for twenty-six years in the yards under Calder Hill, and I knew the difference between a word that shouts and one that waits to be found. So I chose a grey slab no wider than my forearm and a chisel no wider than a barley grain.

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The first word went on the upper edge, arete, which the old scholars said meant the excellence a thing shows when nobody is counting. The second I left until the last morning, agape, the love that asks for nothing back. My apprentice Ilse held the lamp and asked why the second word had to sit so low on the stone. I told her that love is the part of a thing you find on your knees.

Two days later the Queen's steward came back with a complaint. The gate was for the orchard wall between her house and her sister's, and the sisters had not spoken since the flood took the bridge. He wanted the second word finished. I looked at the stone for a long time, then took my mallet and let the last letter run off the edge of the slab, half cut, half air. Ilse asked me why I had spoiled it.

It rained that week, and the water stood in the grooves and held the letters, so from the road the gate read its words in silver. Nobody came to ask me about the missing edge. By autumn the sisters were seen walking the wall together, one on each side of the gate, reading the stone from opposite ends.