Black and grey serif lettering reading OMNIA CAUSA FIUNT, set in stacked diagonal lines across a person's upper arm.

Latin phrase on upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of an upper arm with the Latin words OMNIA CAUSA FIUNT tattooed in stacked, slightly diagonal capital letters. The serif lettering is crisp and solid, with even black ink and no shading. The soft grey background and cropped view of the arm keep the focus on the text.

Lettering Upper arm Latin phrase Text Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dorothy Pask had painted the fairground boards for thirty years, and she still hated a crooked line more than a wet morning. So when the lad from the Hollins Brothers' Dodgems asked her to letter a sign for the ghost train, she agreed on the condition that he hold the ladder steady and stop asking whether the ghosts would be frightened.

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She worked in the lee of the big wheel while rain came and went over the Fenland fields. The phrase she chose was one her late father had cut into the lid of his tool chest: OMNIA CAUSA FIUNT. Everything comes about through causes. He used to say it meant nothing ever simply happened, that a dropped spanner at one end of a fair would be the reason a cake stall tipped over at the other. She stacked the letters on a slant, the way the old showmen liked, and filled each stroke with black enamel so they stood out like print on a handbill.

The lad asked why she bothered with Latin when the punters only wanted to scream. Dorothy said the cause of a scream was always somebody's bad hinge, and that the ride had been built at all because a man named Fenwick lost a bet on a Tuesday. He laughed, then went quiet, because the paint was still tacky and the wheel above them had begun to turn.

When the gust came off the river, it lifted the loose cloth from the trestle and carried it over the ghost train's gate. Dorothy watched the cloth land on the wet grass, face down, and thought about her father's chest, and the hinge she had meant to fix, and the spanner she had left on the step that morning.