Black and grey blackletter Latin lettering with small flourishes across a forearm, set in two lines.

Latin blackletter text on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close view of a forearm carrying two lines of blackletter Latin lettering, with small ornamental flourishes above the first line and below the second. The letters are filled in solid black with soft grey shading, and the strokes are bold and even. The text runs across most of the frame against a blurred background of a studio with chairs, a tiled floor and people's legs.

Lettering Forearm Latin text Blackletter Script Flourish

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Before the church bells, Mrs Oake lit the ovens at the back of Tallow Lane and found the flour sacks dragged across the floor. A grey she-bear sat among the cooling racks, picking at a tray of burnt buns as if they were her due. Edwin, the baker's boy, froze with the peel in his hands and didn't dare breathe.

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The bear had come down off the moor, the carter said later, because the hay had failed up there and the town smelled of too much bread. She wasn't hungry so much as cross, and the noise of the bakery had her cross. Mrs Oake did not run. She told Edwin to fetch the fiddle from under the proving shelf, the one her father had carried from Wexford. Edwin said he could only play hymns, and badly. She said that would do.

He played the one slow tune he knew, a thing about a miller's wife who lost her ring in the mill race. The bear's head came down by degrees. Mrs Oake worked the dough in time with the bow, slap and fold, slap and fold, and the great shoulders lowered with each stroke. The ovens ticked as they heated. By the time the first cart rattled up the lane, the beast was asleep on the flour sacks with white dust on her muzzle.

The carter took her back up the moor that morning, and the fiddle never went back under the proving shelf. Above the bakery door, cut into the lintel by a mason long dead, were the words Musica delenit bestiam feram. Edwin read them every morning for fifty years before he thought to ask what they meant, and by then Mrs Oake had been dead a long while and he had the bread to see to.