Smile script on the inner wrist
Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo
A small black script word reading smile is tattooed across the inner wrist and forearm. The linework is thin and even, with a slight variation in weight along the letter strokes. The photograph is black and white and shows the arm against a plain light background, with the tattoo as the clear focal point.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
Sit closer, you with the wet sandals, and mind the lamp. Every scribe in Alexandria has a story about the one word he could not write, and mine is about Pheraios, who came to my stall by the Canopic gate with a reed pen tucked behind each ear and a debt to pay off in ink.
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He wanted a single word copied onto a strip of papyrus, in the flowing hand the Greeks use for letters home. Not a prayer, not a curse, not a line of poetry. Just the word for smiling, which he could not say aloud to the girl he was courting, because her father stood beside her and watched every mouth that opened near her. So I wrote it for him, one stroke trailing into the next, the tail of the last letter looping back like a fish turning in the shallows.
I asked him why one word needed a scribe. He told me the girl could read but never had the chance to be teased by a boy who sent her poems. A word with no sentence around it, he said, cannot be accused of anything. I thought him a fool, and charged him double.
Three days later he returned with the strip folded small, and his face was split wide. She had written back on the same papyrus, below my letters, a single answer in her own cramped hand: the same word, copied exactly, with the loop of its last letter twisted into a question mark. He paid me in full and then, without a word, bought ink for the whole street.
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