Watercolour-style forearm tattoo with black script reading carpe diem and an abstract double helix in green, red and orange washes.

Carpe diem script and DNA helix on a forearm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A forearm tattoo shows the words carpe diem in thin black script running up the arm, with a loose, abstract double helix made of black brush strokes and dots. Coloured washes in green, red, orange and yellow sit behind the linework, which has a sketchy, painterly quality against plain dark background.

Forearm Carpe diem Script Brush stroke Dot Triangle Splashes

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada Penhallow had the seed tin open on the kitchen table when the sleet began, and she meant to keep the blue pole beans alive if it took every candle in the house. Her father had bred that line up the hill field for forty years. He twisted each young stem by hand so the vines wound round one another like two lengths of rope, and he always said a bean that climbed with a partner would climb higher than one that went alone.

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The winter came early that year. The brook froze to black glass by Martinmas and the cattle were moved down into the yard. Ada sorted the seed by lamplight, dropping the speckled ones into the ash bucket and keeping only the hard, clean-split beans. Her brother Tom leaned in the doorway with his cap in his hands and asked what good seed was when there was nothing to eat in March. She tapped the words painted over the cart door, the ones their father had copied from a schoolmaster's book in careful brush letters, and told him they meant seize the day, and that a seed in a tin was a day nobody had yet taken.

She laid the best beans on wet flannel above the range, two to a dish, and kept them warm through the nights when the coal ran low. Some split and sulked. Some sent up pale shoots that bent toward the lamp. By February she had strung twine from the beam to the window ledge, and the seedlings were coiling up it in pairs, green threads wound tight, the way her father had taught her with his thumb on the stem.

Tom came in one morning stamping snow from his boots and stopped dead in the doorway. The shoots had climbed the whole length of the twine overnight, twisting around each other toward the glass. Ada opened the shutter on the first thaw and let the light fall across them, and neither of them said anything for a while.