Black cursive script lettering reading carpe diem on a white background, a tattoo design with no body placement shown.

Carpe diem in cursive script

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

The image shows the words carpe diem written in a flowing, monoline cursive script in solid black on a plain white background. The letters have smooth, even strokes with tall ascenders and a long looping descender on the p, and the word spacing is generous. There is no shading, no colour and no body part visible, so it reads as a lettering design rather than a photograph of skin.

Lettering Carpe diem Script Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lettering on the bulkhead above the hydroponic hatch has been repainted so many times that the tall loops of the d have gone soft, and nobody on the Meridian Long Haul remembers who first wrote it. You are on rota this cycle to scrape the old paint back, and Dorota from the water works has brought a tin of clear lacquer and a cracked thermos of tea that tastes of rust.

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She asks what you would do if the ship docked tomorrow. You say you would sleep in a bed that does not hum. She laughs and says that is not a day, that is a nap. The scraper catches on the descender of the p, which curls down past the frame like a fishing line, and you work around it slowly, the way your grandmother taught you to unpick a knot without cutting the thread.

Forty years back, the archive says, a girl named Ines Halloran climbed up here with a stencil and a brush, because the mission board had voted to shorten the daylight cycle and she wanted the crew to remember what the words were for. The board is gone. The stencil is lost. Only the spacing remains, wide as a held breath, and someone must have chosen that on purpose.

When the last flake comes away you find, under the grey, a smaller line in pencil: a date, and beneath it, in the same looping hand, a question mark. You photograph it for the logs. Then you dip the brush and paint a dot over the i of diem, which has always looked to you like a bird that forgot how to land, and you tell Dorota it is finished.