Fine line black script tattoo reading semper ad meliora on the inner upper arm of a woman with long hair, lifted arm, gold bracelets.

Semper ad meliora script on upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a small black script tattoo reading semper ad meliora along the inner upper arm. The thin, even linework is fairly delicate, with a little variation in stroke weight across the letters. The ink is dark black on pale skin against a plain white wall, with the arm raised and the wearer's head partly visible at the left edge.

Fine line Lettering Upper arm Script Latin phrase Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Hadfield set the chalk down on the sill and waited for the lamp to stop smoking before she read the line again. Twenty-two children had copied it onto their slates that morning, Semper ad meliora, and most of them had spelled meliora with an extra i or none at all. Only Tom Reay had got the tail of the final a exactly right, looping it the way his father looped his name on the pit wages book.

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Outside, the wheel at Eastwood Colliery turned over for the afternoon shift, and the cage dropped with a sound she felt in her teeth. Tom's father had gone down at six. Everyone in Ashgrove knew the shaft went deeper every year, and that the seam under the allotments had started to bend the wrong way. Still, the men went down, and the boys wrote their Latin as if the words were a kind of rope.

On Friday the Reay boy came to the schoolroom door after the others had gone, a slate held flat against his chest. He had written the phrase again, smaller this time, the strokes so fine they nearly vanished in the grey. "Miss, is it always better, though? Or only towards?" She had no answer ready. She took the slate, wiped it with her sleeve, and wrote the words back for him in her own careful hand, one after another, until the lamp burned low and the wheel stopped for the night.