Black script lettering reading Carpe Librum on the inner wrist, shown in a close photograph of the arm.

Carpe Librum script on the wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows the inner wrist with the words Carpe Librum in flowing black script, the first word above the second and slightly offset. The lettering uses smooth, even linework with bold strokes and a few fine tails, and the ink is solid black with grey tones at the edges. The text sits centrally on the wrist against a plain skin background, with a grey fabric and dark patterned surface behind.

Lettering Forearm Latin phrase Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now sit down, the lot of you, and mind the wasps, because the Pippins at the bottom of the row have gone soft and the wasps knew it before we did. Old Tam Fairley kept a library in his shed, forty years of it, and when the damp got into the spines he wheeled the whole lot out to the orchard on a handcart. That is how the grandchildren came to be climbing the trees with novels stuffed in their pockets.

Keep reading

Carpere, the Romans said, meaning to pluck, the way you pluck a plum when it's ripe enough to let go. Tam's granddaughter Nessa was seventeen and cross about everything, and she would not read. Books were dead things, she said. So Tam hung a copy of Lorna Doone from the lowest branch, its cover blistered by a summer of sun, and told her she had better take it down before the rooks did.

She stood under it the best part of an hour. Then she reached up, the spine gave with a small crack, and she read the first line standing among the windfalls with juice running down to her elbow. By the time the church bell went for six she had half the orchard's stories in her lap and was calling out the endings to nobody at all.

Years on, the pears still drop on the path and the children still climb up for the books. Nessa, who never once cared for anything printed, keeps a battered Lorna Doone on the kitchen windowsill, its cover bleached to the colour of straw, and she says it is the only fruit she has ever been able to keep.