Black lettering tattoo reading 'nōsce tē ipsum' in a blackletter-style script across the inner forearm, above the wrist, with beaded and braided bracelets.

Latin lettering 'nōsce tē ipsum' on forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a black lettering tattoo in a blackletter-style script reading 'nōsce tē ipsum' across the inner forearm, just above the wrist. The letters are solid black with clean edges and little visible shading, and the skin tone is neutral against a dark sleeve and a grey-green background. The phrase sits centrally in the frame, with two bracelets, one of wooden beads and one of braided brown leather, partly visible above it.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Ned Carrow tapped the lintel stone with his knuckle every morning before the cage went down, the way other men touched wood for luck. The words cut into it had been there since the first shaft was sunk, and nobody in Hollin could say who had carved them or why, only that the letters were deep and the mason had been paid in coal.

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His son Abel thought the words were a dare. He was nineteen and had been to the market town twice, and he said a man who needed telling to know himself had clearly never looked in a mirror. Ned didn't argue. He only gave him a lamp with a cracked glass and said the seam under the east workings was where the water came up, and a man who could not read his own footing in the dark would drown there faster than a fool.

Abel went down that first week counting the timbers aloud to keep himself company. On the fourth day the roof shifted and the lamps went out, and in the black he stopped counting, because the counting had been the thing he hid behind. He found his own breath, loud and frightened, and then the slow drip of water that told him where the level ran. He crawled toward it with his palms flat on the cold floor, and when the rescue men lit the lamps again he found he knew, quite plainly, where he had come from.

Ned said nothing when Abel came up grey and shaking. He only tapped the stone again, and this time Abel tapped it too.

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