Black stylised calligraphic design resembling Arabic script with three diamonds and a vertical stroke, shown as a flash drawing on a plain light grey background.

Stylised calligraphic letterforms with diamonds

Black and grey · Flash

A black ink drawing of stylised calligraphic letterforms resembling Arabic script, with a vertical stroke above, a loop, a curved base and three small diamond shapes. The linework is solid and uniform with no shading, set centrally on a plain light grey background. The word Life is printed in small text beneath the design.

Calligraphy Script Diamond Arabic script Line Life

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, the boards are soft there. Now listen, because the lamp is low and I won't tell it twice. My grandmother's brother, Yusuf, went down to Basra as a boy with one brass compass and a letter from a man in Muscat that nobody ever read aloud. He signed on to a dhow carrying dates and pearls, and the captain, a man with three gold teeth and no patience, set him to scraping the hull with a blade every morning until he could draw his own name on a plank without looking.

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The captain had a habit. Each night he cut a small diamond into the rail with his knife, one for each storm they rode out, and he'd touch them with his thumb like beads. By the third month the rail was crowded with them. Yusuf asked him what a diamond meant, and the captain said, a storm you didn't drown in, and then, after a while, a line he had not yet finished. He had brought the letters with him from his own father, and he showed Yusuf how the long upright stroke dropped from the mast, how the loop held the breath, how the curve at the bottom sat like a bowl catching rain.

They hit the Makran coast in a calm so flat the sea looked poured. Yusuf sat on the bow and wrote the letters in the salt with one finger, over and over, until the wind came back and took them all, the way wind does. The captain laughed until he coughed. Keep the shape in your hand, he said, the sea keeps nothing else. Yusuf did. That is why, when he came home with no pearls and no compass, he could still write the word for living, and why, when they buried him, the stonecutter had to ask his sons what it meant.