Black script lettering reading Fidem habe across the upper thigh of a woman wearing a grey top.

Fidem habe script on a thigh

Lettering · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A close crop shows a woman in a grey marl top holding the fabric with one hand, with a single line of cursive script tattoo across the outer upper thigh. The words Fidem habe are written in smooth, even black ink with flowing joins and a fine-to-medium stroke. The soft, neutral background and pale skin tones keep the focus on the lettering.

Lettering Thigh Script Latin text Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, you lot, and mind the brazier, because this is the tale of Brother Osric and the ink that would not hold. He was the finest hand in the scriptorium at Saint Wenna's on the Fen, and when the abbot set him to copy the great psalter for the new choir, Osric ground his oak galls every morning and mixed them with gum. Every morning the ink came out a shade paler than the day before, and the novices swore the devil had got into the well.

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Osric paid them no heed. He sat at his slope with the cold coming up through the flags and wrote the same two Latin words in the margins, over and over, Fidem habe, the words the old prior had said to him on the night he took his vows and was frightened of the dark cell. He let the pen run on without lifting, every join flowing into the next, because a pen that lifts is a pen that doubts, and Osric had decided he would not doubt.

Then came Candlemas, and the floodwater rose over the causeway, and the lad who carried bread out to the far hermitage went under while the bell was still ringing. Osric took a lantern and a coil of rope down to the water with his sleeves still inky to the elbow. He found the boy clinging to a drowned willow, tied the rope round his own waist, and sang the verse of the psalm he had been copying all winter until the boy's hands let go of the bark and came up onto the bank.

When the psalter was finally bound, the abbot opened it at the first page and found the ink had settled as dark and true as a night sky. Nobody could say when it had happened. Osric had not been mixing any different galls. Look at it yourselves, if you ever get the chance to visit. The words are still as black as the morning he came in from the water, and the margin beside them is still wet with lantern oil.