Black Arabic script with English transliteration beneath it, reading dream, believe, dare, do, shown as a lettering design on a plain white background with no skin visible.

Arabic lettering reading dream, believe, dare, do

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

Three Arabic words are set on one line in black calligraphic script, separated by small dots, with the English words dream, believe, dare and do in a smaller sans-serif line beneath. The linework is solid and even with no shading, and the design sits centred on a plain white background. The composition is a simple, horizontal text layout typical of a lettering design.

Lettering Arabic script Dream Believe Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nadia had painted the names on every hull in Port Lenan for twenty years, and the boat that came up the slipway that Tuesday had none. Its owner, a thin man in a salt-stained oilskin, stood with his hands in his pockets while the tide ran out behind him.

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"Four words," he said. "Right across the stern, where the gulls sit."

She asked him for them. He gave them in Arabic first, which he said his father had written on the back of a ration card in 1961, and then in English, slowly, as if he were testing a gangplank. Dream. Believe. Dare. Do. She laughed, because it sounded like a poster in a dentist's waiting room, and he didn't laugh back.

She worked through the afternoon with a squirrel-hair brush and a tin of black enamel, taking the letters one at a time. The Arabic was the hard part. The dots had to sit exactly between the words, and the strokes had to thicken where the pen would have pressed down. Her hand kept wanting to make the words lean the way English leans. By dusk the stern read right to left, a line she could not have read herself a week before, and the man came back down the quay with a flask of tea and stood looking at it a long while.

"He'd have liked the dots," he said at last. "Dad was always particular about the dots." Then he climbed aboard, cast off without another word, and the boat slid out past the breakwater with its four words catching the last of the light.