Black and white photo of a Latin phrase, OMNIA CAUSA FIUNT, set in serif capitals across the upper arm in lettering tattoo.

Latin lettering on upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows an upper arm, raised and partly covered by a short sleeve, with the words OMNIA CAUSA FIUNT tattooed in three stacked lines of serif capitals. The letters are solid black with clean edges and even spacing, and the lines run diagonally up the arm. The image is monochrome with soft, bright lighting and a plain pale background.

Lettering Upper arm Latin text Phrase

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wooden type was running short again. Dell Harrow counted the lead letters in the drawer by lamplight while the generator coughed outside the winter quarters at Bramble Fen, and found only two Os left, which would not be enough for the words Hollis wanted on the new bills. "Omnia causa fiunt," he had said that morning, tapping the phrase on a scrap of card as if it were a horse he meant to sell. Everything happens for a reason. Dell had not asked which reason.

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She set it anyway, stacking the three lines diagonally on the bed of the old Albion press so the letters would climb the poster the way the trapeze wires climbed the tent. Her hands knew the spacing without looking. The show had been down to four acts since the March fire took the menagerie tent, the lion tamer had gone to a care home in Lincoln, and the clowns now split their wages with the man who drove the truck. Each handbill came off the press a little grey at the edges, the ink thinning as the tin ran low.

The last printing came out clean. Hollis stood in the doorway in his good coat, studying the sheet as though it might argue. "The Fenwick girls will want these," he said. "Put them up in every town from here to the coast." Dell wiped her fingers on a rag and said nothing about the Os, or the tent, or the fourteen people still owed a summer.

After he left she carried one sheet out into the frost and pinned it to the gate of the empty ring. The black letters held the lamplight. Somewhere in the dark a horse stamped, and she thought that the cause was perhaps only this: three lines of type, stacked tight and climbing, and whatever the road did with them next.