Black script lettering reading sic parvis magna across a man's upper back near the shoulder, with framed pictures on the wall behind.

Script lettering across a shoulder

Lettering · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a man seen from behind, showing black cursive script that reads sic parvis magna across the upper back near the shoulder. The letters have thin, flowing strokes with looped capitals and a few fine-line details, all in black ink. The background is a pale wall with several framed pictures, and the soft lighting keeps the focus on the tattoo.

Lettering Shoulder Script Lettering Latin phrase Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hettie had brought the old exercise books because nobody else would remember the verbs. The hall smelled of floor polish and warm sausage rolls, and a laminated sign on the trestle table read Class of 1994, Welcome Back, with a dent in one corner where someone had leant a crate of squash against it. She set the books beside the name badges and watched the room fill with people who had once sat in rows copying out amo, amas, amat until the ink ran dry.

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Near the urn a man she barely recognised held up his phone to show her something. It was a scrap torn from a worksheet, and across it, in her own red biro from thirty years ago, she had written sic parvis magna and underlined it twice. He had kept it. He said it had got him through a bad winter in Sheffield, a job he hated and a flat with damp on every wall. She asked him what he had made of it. He said he had taken it to mean that small things add up, which was close enough to what she had meant, though she had mostly meant that the grammar was tricky and the translation was worse.

After the speeches she found the phrase again, this time on the back of her own badge, scrawled in felt tip by someone who had clearly been bored through the cheese and pineapple. She didn't know who. She peeled it off, folded it once, and tucked it into the spine of the register where the pages had gone soft. Outside, the rain had started, and the light from the hall lay across the car park in long yellow strips, each one a little longer than the last, as the door swung shut behind the last of them.