Black lettering tattoo reading Carpe Diem inside an infinity symbol on a forearm, in a script lettering style.

Carpe Diem script in an infinity symbol

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows the words Carpe Diem in cursive script, with the word Carpe on the left loop and Diem on the right of an infinity symbol outlined in black. The linework is clean and fairly fine, with some soft grey shading along the edges of the letters. The ink is black and grey on pale skin, and the design is centred across the arm against a plain background.

Lettering Forearm Infinity Carpe diem Script Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tomasz, you will be wondering why a man who spent thirty-one years teaching Latin to boys who would rather be anywhere else has finally written to you. The answer is the postcard that arrived on Tuesday, with your handwriting on it and a stamp from Lisbon. You wrote only two words, and you underlined the second one twice, the way you used to underline mistakes in your translations of Horace. Seize the day, you said, as if I had ever needed telling.

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I did need telling, as it turns out. For most of my life I treated the phrase as something carved over the door of a school assembly hall, handsome and useless. Then your mother sent me the photograph of the bridge you had painted on the wall of that bar in Porto, the one with the lettering running round it in a long unbroken loop, and I went out the next morning and bought a tin of tea and a pair of walking boots I have not yet worn.

So here is my news. I have sold the house on Alder Road and the cat has gone to the vicar. I leave on the first train north with a rucksack and a notebook, and I intend to reach the sea by the end of the month. Do not come to meet me. If you are still in Lisbon, meet me instead at the place where the two lines of the ink cross, because I suspect that is where the day begins. Yours, with more ink than sense, Hector.