Black ink lettering reading Nosce te ipsum in a joined script style, running diagonally across a forearm.

Latin lettering across a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows a forearm with the Latin phrase Nosce te ipsum written in black ink across the skin at a diagonal. The letters use a joined, slightly calligraphic script with uneven, sketchy strokes and no shading. The image is in black and grey against a dark background, with a soft vignette and the subject centred in a square frame.

Lettering Forearm Latin phrase Lettering Script Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hesk the stonecutter had spent thirty years cutting the same three words over the river gates of Ambry Vale, and every year the king's reeve came back asking for them bigger. The stone was grey and close-grained, and Hesk liked it because it held a line without fuss. He cut the letters joined and leaning, the N tipping into the O like two old men sharing a bench, and he never once apologised for it.

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One autumn a girl called Wenna came up to the quarry with a bucket of lime and asked why the east gate looked so careless. Hesk told her the chisel slipped when the letters ran together. She laughed and said it was the only honest thing she had seen in the kingdom, and then she sat on a block and watched him work until the light went orange on the spoil heaps.

The reeve arrived in spring with a letter from the king. The words were to be recut so they could be read from the saddle of a passing horse, straight and tall, with no nonsense. Hesk put down his mallet and said nothing for a long while. Then he picked it up again and carved the phrase slantwise, the way the river carries a branch downstream, so that it could only be read by someone who stopped walking.

The reeve shouted, then sent for soldiers, then sent them away again when he saw the old man's hands were steady. He stood in the mud and squinted at the stone. Eventually he crouched, then knelt, then pressed his thumb into the groove of the first letter. He went back to the capital without a word. By midsummer moss had filled the cuts, and Wenna still came each morning to brush it out with her sleeve.