Close-up of the Italian phrase la pura verità in fine black serif lettering on skin at the side of the neck.

Italian phrase la pura verità in black serif

Lettering · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

The image shows the words la pura verità tattooed in a thin, upright serif typeface across the skin. The linework is crisp and even, rendered in solid black ink with no shading or added colour. The text runs diagonally from lower left to upper right, with the skin softly out of focus around it and a few small moles visible.

Lettering Neck Word Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bell-founder of Porto Lenza had cast nine bells for the harbour church, and nine times the sea had taken its share of the boats that heard them ring. The tenth he cast himself in the dry week before midsummer. He asked the printing house on the quay for a boy who could cut letters standing upright as soldiers, and they sent Ottavio, seventeen years old and afraid of the furnace.

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The town argued over the inscription. The priest wanted a psalm and the harbourmaster wanted his drowned wife's name. Ottavio chose la pura verità, the pure truth, because it was the only thing he had been asked to set straight all year, and because the founder had said a bell should never lie to men rowing out through fog. He cut each letter in reverse on the wax, the serifs like small feet planted on the metal, and the bronze was poured on a Tuesday when the gulls were quiet.

The bell hung true for three winters. Then, on the night the Adriana went out with eleven men aboard and came back with nine, it rang once and cracked straight through the accent over the second u. The founder said the metal had been poured too cold. The fishermen say otherwise, that a bell with a true word cut into it will not sound for a lie, and that it cracked because the harbourmaster had stood beneath it that evening and promised the sea would be kind.

Ottavio went back to setting type until his hands shook. He kept one proof sheet of the phrase folded in his cap, and each dawn he read it aloud from the quay wall, though nobody had asked him for the truth, and the boats went out regardless.