Black script lettering reading Numquam timebunt umbrae along the upper arm of a person with their arm raised, shown from behind.

Latin script quote on upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph of a person seen from behind with one arm raised, showing a fine, flowing script tattoo along the outer upper arm. The words Numquam timebunt umbrae are written in a slanted italic hand, with the second line set slightly lower and to the right. The ink is black or dark grey on warm skin, set against a plain pale wall with soft, even daylight and a pink halter strap in the corner of the frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift at Coldharbour House has been broken since the spring, so you climb, fourteen floors with a box of your mother's saucepans knocking against your hip. On the eighth landing the strip light has gone, and the dark sits on the stairs like something spilt. You stop to shift the box and hear a child's voice behind the door of 8C, reciting times tables in a whisper, stumbling over the sevens.

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Your mother used to say the Latin came from a schoolmistress at her convent, a Miss Ferrier who rapped knuckles and wrote things on the blackboard that nobody understood until it was too late to ask. Numquam timebunt umbrae. They will never fear the shadows. She said it the night the gas meter failed and you both sat in the kitchen with one candle, passing a single tin of pears back and forth with a fork. You thought it was a prayer. Later you decided it was a dare.

On the fourteenth floor the flat door is already open, the hall light on, and a girl of about nine stands in the doorway in a dressing gown too big for her. "Are you the new one?" she asks. "The lady downstairs said the flat was haunted." You tell her the only thing in there is a box of saucepans. She considers this, then informs you that the light on the eighth landing has been out for a month and she has been counting the steps in the dark to get to school.

Tomorrow you will go down and change the bulb yourself, with the stepladder from the cupboard under the stairs. Tonight you leave the hall light burning, and you teach her the words in Miss Ferrier's accent. She repeats them back wrong, shadows for umbrae, and you let her keep it.

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