Black script lettering tattoo reading Dream as if you will live forever, live as if you will die today, across a forearm in a black and grey style.

Script quote tattoo on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A forearm carries two lines of flowing black script lettering that read Dream as if you will live forever and Live as if you will die today, with decorative flourishes on the capital letters. The linework is smooth and even, with solid black strokes and no visible shading or colour. The camera sits close to the arm with a soft blurred background, and the lettering runs diagonally across the skin from the wrist side towards the elbow.

Lettering Forearm Script Quote Flourish Lettering Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ink froze in the pot again, so I warmed it against my ribs the way Sister Agnes taught me, and when it still ran thin I went on with the psalter using the grey water it left. Nobody else sits in the scriptorium at Carrow Keep now. The roof came down in the winter of the flood, and the wind moves through the nave as if it has business there.

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Above the gate, where the stone stays sound, someone cut two lines into the lintel long before my time. Dream as if you will live forever. Live as if you will die today. The letters are so fine that the rain never quite fills them, and the flourishes curl off the capitals like smoke off a snuffed wick. Brother Oswin said it was a rule for abbots. I have always thought it was a dare, carved by a girl with a borrowed chisel who meant to outlast the place.

Last Michaelmas the cold came early and the psalter pages cracked at the spine. I had to choose between finishing the illumination and keeping the fire lit, and I chose the fire. That night I sat with the cinders and tried to decide which of the two lines I had been living by. The answer embarrassed me. I had copied for fifty years as though the book would never end, and I had never once written a word of my own.

So in the margin of the last leaf, in letters smaller than any I had been paid to make, I wrote the same two lines, then a third that was only mine: mend the roof before you sleep. In the morning I will tell the carters the wagon can come in through the east arch. The ink held this time. It did not freeze, and the letters ran slantwise down the page toward the spine, the way rain runs down the stone above the gate.