Black and grey medallion tattoo with Greek lettering and a large lambda, shaded to look dimensional, on the lower leg.

Greek lettered medallion on a lower leg

Lettering · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A circular medallion sits on the lower leg, with Greek lettering around the edge and a large lambda with an inner Omega-style letter at its centre. The linework is bold and the shading is heavy and dimensional, giving the emblem a carved or stone-like look. The tattoo is entirely black and grey and fills most of the frame against a pale background.

Lettering Calf Medallion Circle Emblem Shield

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The disc had been in my drawer for eleven weeks when the man came to the hatch at Holm Junction, asking for it by its shape before he said a word about it. Heavy, he said, round as a biscuit tin lid, black with age and worn bright at the rim. I knew it at once. A boy had found it under a bench on platform three and brought it to me with his fists closed, as if it might bite. The ledger said: one medallion, bronze, lettered in Greek, unclaimed.

Keep reading

I asked him to read the letters around the edge so I could be sure. He tried, and gave up after the first word, and I could see him deciding whether to be embarrassed. Then he said it properly, slowly, the way a man reads something he has had to learn by heart. Molon labe. Come and take them. He said his grandfather had used to say it at the kitchen table whenever the gas board rang, and that the lambda in the middle was for Lakonia, though he admitted his grandfather had never been to Greece and had got the lambda from a cereal packet.

I should have asked for proof, and I didn't. I slid the disc across the counter and watched him turn it over, thumb moving along the carved ridges as if checking for a crack he already knew was there. He didn't thank me. He looked at the ledger, then at the line where I write who collects, and waited.

I wrote his name in the box. Under reason, where the form asks why an item was kept, I wrote: returned to the man who knew what it said.