Black and grey tattoo of a cracked stone-effect cross with the Latin words Carpe Diem and Nosce Te Ipsum, placed on the upper arm.

Cracked stone cross with Latin text on upper arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large cross sits on the upper arm, with its arms and shaft shaded to look like carved, cracked stone. The words CARPE DIEM run across the arms and NOSCE TE IPSUM runs down the shaft in raised block lettering. The work uses black outlines and grey shading only, and the cross fills most of the frame against the skin.

Upper arm Cross Stone Carpe diem Lettering Latin text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The crack ran straight down the shaft on the third night of frost, and Aldous Penrith swore it had not been there when we left the yard at dusk. He ran his thumb along it the way a nurse checks a fever. "Stone keeps its grudges," he said. "Carve it wrong and it will show you in a hard winter."

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The cross was for the chapel at Hollin Gate, where the last king of the river lands lies under a slab nobody reads any more. Penrith had cut the arms himself, CARPE DIEM across them in letters a hand's width tall, and I had cut the shaft, NOSCE TE IPSUM, one letter at a time, while he sat on his stool and said nothing for a whole morning. When I asked why he had chosen such old phrases, he told me the lords of Hollin paid for words that would outlast their debts.

We spent the thaw arguing. I wanted to chisel the fracture out, reset the stone and start clean. He wanted it left. "A cross with no flaws is a cross somebody bought," he said. So I cut the T of TE deeper and let the split run through the middle of the letter, and I did the same to the P of IPSUM, until the damage and the lettering became one shape that no chisel could have planned.

We raised it at Candlemas. From the road below, in lamplight, the cracks threw shadows like veins, and the words seemed to stand up out of the broken rock. Penrith died the next spring. The frost still finds the same seams every winter, and I still go up to read the shaft from the bottom, which is how he taught me to read anything worth knowing.