Red Spartan helmet tattoo with black Greek lettering reading Molon Labe on the inner upper arm, in a bold solid style.

Spartan helmet with Greek lettering on an arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A solid red Spartan helmet with a crest of radiating bands sits to the left of two lines of bold black Greek capitals, which read as a phrase. The ink is flat fill with clean edges and no visible shading, and the red and black sit against pale skin. The tattoo is centred on the inner upper arm, with the lettering set slightly lower than the helmet.

Lettering Upper arm Helmet Text Crest

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the kettle's on, and mind the cat, she has opinions about boots. Now, you want to know why old Yannis painted a helmet on the harbour wall. I'll tell you, though you'll not like how it ends.

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It was the winter the men from the council came down the quay with clipboards and a van and a new rule about the slipway. Every boat on the mole had to be hauled, measured and licensed, or it could stay in the water and rot. Yannis had the Maria Kali, forty years on her hull, and he was not having her numbered like a parking space.

He stood at the top of the slip with his arms folded. The inspector, a young man in a coat too clean for fish, read the notice aloud twice, the way they do when they think repetition is law. Then he said, very politely, that the boat would be removed at the owner's expense on Monday. Yannis said nothing for a while. Then he took a tin of red paint from his jacket pocket, the paint he used for the buoys, and he drew on the grey stone behind him a Spartan helmet, its crest fanned out like the spokes of a wheel. Under it, in black, he wrote the two words his grandfather had taught him from a book with a cracked spine, molon labe, and he translated them for the inspector as come and take them.

Nobody came on Monday. The council sent a letter instead, and then another, and somewhere in the drafting the phrase got read out in a meeting, and a clerk who had learned Greek at school laughed until he cried. The Maria Kali is still on the slip. The helmet is still on the wall, a little faded, and when the young ones ask me what it means, I tell them it means you keep what is yours, and that the men with clipboards always count the boats twice.