Black and grey photograph of a lettering tattoo of three interlocking circles made of Latin text across a person's upper back.

Latin text in interlocking circles on upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey photograph taken from behind shows three overlapping circles formed from lines of Latin text in a fine, serif-like script. The lettering is crisp and evenly spaced, with small dots separating the words around each ring. The soft, directional light falls across the upper back, leaving the edges of the tattoo sharp against the skin and the dark background.

Lettering Back Latin text Circle Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Aldous Quarrie had cut the letters for the third bell by lamplight, and by the time Tobias came down the ladder into the foundry the wax was already cold on the mould. "Read it to me," Quarrie said without looking up from his pattern. Tobias moved his lips over the curled capitals that ran round the waist of the wax: cotidie damnatur qui semper timet. Every day he is condemned who always fears.

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"That's a grim thing to cast over a churchyard," Tobias said. Quarrie wiped his thumbs on his apron. "The vicar wanted a sermon. I gave him a rule for the carters." He tapped the smaller ring of words that cut across the first, where the letters crowded and then stopped at a single dot. "Those two bells are already done. Read where they meet."

Tobias bent close to the wax. Where the circles crossed, two phrases shared the same stretch of metal, one running clockwise, one against it, and the letters had been cut so that each word sat exactly on the other's space. He could read neither phrase whole. He could only read the dot between them, which was the same in both.

"Fear and freedom," Quarrie said. "They have to be made in the same pour, or the thing won't ring true." He pulled the cloth off the crucible. When the bell was hung that autumn, the sexton struck it for the old founder's funeral, and the note went out over the marsh and came back off the water. Nobody on the lane could read the words inside the metal, but Tobias stood under the tower and felt the dot against his palm where the two rings met, and he understood the rule was never meant for the carters.