Black script lettering reading Esse Quam Videri with a butterfly above it, tattooed on the top of a foot, with red painted toenails.

Latin script and butterfly on the top of a foot

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A black script inscription reading Esse Quam Videri runs across the top of a foot, with a small outlined butterfly above the word Quam. The lines are smooth and even, with solid black ink and no visible shading. The skin tone and the carpet behind the foot are the only other colours in the frame.

Lettering Other Butterfly Script Latin text Foot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ivy Mullen came to the Majestic every Saturday in the same navy frock, and every Saturday she stood by the cloakroom ticket hatch and wouldn't dance until somebody asked her properly. Mrs Dunn at the cloakroom called her a proper little madam. I called her nothing at all, because I was seventeen and stupid and wanted her to notice me.

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She had a battered book of Latin sayings from her grandfather, the sort with a ribbon marker, and she read them aloud while we waited for the band to tune up. Esse quam videri, she said one night, tapping the page. To be, rather than to seem. I laughed and asked what she was seeming to be, and she pulled off her gloves and drew a butterfly on the back of my hand with a kohl pencil, quick and crooked, and said that was the only thing in the room worth copying.

The band struck up a foxtrot. Ivy walked straight across the floor in her stocking feet, past the lads leaning on the urn, and held out her hand to me without a word. We went round twice before anyone noticed the gap where she'd been standing.

Years on, a man in a shop on Harbour Street asked what I wanted inked, and I told him the words and the butterfly. He asked if it was a lot of Latin for one arm, and I said it was only the one sentence. The kohl washed off my hand within the week. Ivy never did learn to keep still, and I never learned to dance without her, so I still stand a little to one side of every room, where she left me.