Flash sheet of six black serif Latin phrases with English translations and sizes, including Silentium est aureum, Veni vidi vici and Carpe diem, for tattoo lettering designs.

Latin phrase lettering flash sheet

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A flash sheet of six Latin phrases set in a black serif typeface on a plain white background, each with a small English translation and dimensions in centimetres. The phrases are arranged in blocks of two or three lines, with the translations printed in a smaller sans-serif font beneath. The sheet uses solid black ink only, with no shading or imagery.

Lettering Latin phrase Gold Love Carpe diem Flash sheet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Rain came off the canal all morning, so nobody at the Tuesday market was looking for a sign-painter, least of all me. I sat under my awning with a pot of size and a brush my father left me, lettering a fishmonger's board in a hurry. Ruth Pemberton walked past three times before she stopped and shook her umbrella over my pavement like a dog.

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"I want one of those," she said, pointing at the sheet of Latin I keep pinned by the till. It was a sales trick my cousin talked me into: six phrases in plain black serif, and most people picked the first one they could pronounce. "Silence is gold," she read aloud. "My mother said that every time I talked back. Can you do it in gold?" I told her gold leaf is fussy in damp weather and she'd have to wait while it set. She said she had nowhere to be, which I didn't believe, but I didn't say so.

While I cut the leaf she read the others out in a voice that carried over the rain. In wine there is truth, she laughed, and said her husband would have been first to paint that on the wall of the pub. Veni vidi vici, she said, was what you shouted when you came to the market and won nothing all week. Then she went quiet, and it was the sort of quiet she'd been practising for years.

When the leaf had gone down I asked which one she wanted. She tapped the glass over carpe diem, then over the first phrase again. "Keep the words," she said. "Just do the gold." So I laid the letters one at a time while the rain kept on, and when she left she paid in coins still warm from her pocket. The board hung wet in the grey light, and the gold did what gold does, which is to look as if it has always been there and never once had to explain itself.