Greek lettering tattoo reading gnothi seauton

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

Two lines of black Greek lowercase lettering sit on pale skin, reading gnothi seauton in a serif typeface. The lines are solid, with even, clean strokes and no shading. The ink is black against a soft, slightly warm skin tone, and the text is centred in a tight, simple composition.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sign-writer's brush had dried stiff in its jar, so Nikos spent the first hour of the morning soaking it in turpentine while Kyria Maria pretended not to watch from the bakery step. The board was for the chandlery on the quay at Kalamata, and it had to say exactly what her husband had ordered before the war. She had kept the instruction folded in a biscuit tin for eleven years, along with his spectacles and a ration card nobody had thought to throw away.

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Nikos copied the letters from the scrap of paper, one at a time, because he did not know the shapes well enough to trust his hand. The gamma hung like a fishhook. The theta was a wheel with a bar through its middle, and he had to keep reminding himself that the bar was the point. When he asked what the words meant, Maria said Stavros used to murmur them while he mended nets, usually when someone was about to lift more than they could carry. Know yourself, the old fool would say, and then ask for a hand with the heavy end.

By noon the lines were black and even on the wet board, and the sea wind had begun to lift the corners of the drop cloth. Maria walked out to the middle of the quay, squinted up at the sign for a long time, and read it aloud, slowly, letter by letter, as if checking a bill. Then she turned to Nikos and asked whether he could make a second board, smaller, for the boat. Stavros had been losing track of which end of the rope was which, she said, and it would save her shouting.