Black and grey photo of a fine line script tattoo reading ad maiora on the inner wrist, with the hand raised in a fist.

Fine line script on the inner wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small fine line script reading "ad maiora" runs horizontally across the inner wrist, with the hand clenched above it. The linework is thin and even, in solid black ink with no shading. The plain white background and soft black and white tones keep the focus on the tattoo.

Fine line Forearm Script Word Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The galley of the Calder Star smells of scorched onion at six in the morning, and Mr Ogilvie, the chief steward, is writing on the back of the menu card again. You have been aboard nine weeks and have stopped asking what the two words are for. He tells you on the Tuesday the weevils win the flour bin anyway. "Ad maiora," he says, pressing the stub of pencil flat. "To greater things. Said by men who have run out of other ideas."

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He writes it at the foot of every letter he posts home from Tyne ports, to a wife in Hull who has never once replied. You know this because the carbons live in a Huntley and Palmers tin under the bench, and you have dusted them while the hot plate ticked. Forty men eat from your pots twice a day. Off Finisterre the swell comes up, a tray of bread goes over, and Ogilvie keeps writing without raising his eyes from the page.

At Middlesbrough he goes ashore with his cap at an angle and does not come back aboard. The second mate finds the tin on the bench the next morning, unlocked, and tucked inside the lid a single unposted envelope with your name on it in pencil. Inside is one line: ad maiora. Beneath it, in the same careful hand, Keep the flour dry.

You do not open the tin again. That evening, when the lamp is low and the last tray is in the rack, you take the menu card from its nail, turn it over, and write the two words at the foot in capitals that lean the way his did. Tomorrow the soup will go out with the phrase still on the card, and forty men will read it without knowing whose hand it was.