Close photo of the words Valar Morghulis in thin black cursive lettering across the inside of a wrist, a fine line lettering tattoo.

Valar Morghulis in script on a wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The image shows the words Valar Morghulis written in two lines of black cursive script across the inner wrist of a pale-skinned arm. The linework is thin and even, with the letters slightly slanted and joined in a handwritten style. The tattoo is shown in black ink on a plain background of a bathroom or indoor setting, with the lettering centred on the wrist.

Lettering Fine line Forearm Script Word Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, and stop staring at the tide like it owes you money. You want the tale of Hobb Tenner's boat, the Mirrow, and I'll tell it once, because my knees won't stand a second telling.

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Hobb had a trader's tongue, the kind that picks up words off a foreign hull the way gulls pick up crusts. He came home from the Low Sounds with a scrap of salt-stained parchment and a sentence he couldn't spell and wouldn't translate. Valar morghulis, he'd mutter whenever the nets came up empty. The old men took it for a blessing. The women took it for a curse. Nobody thought to ask the Dutchman who sold it to him what it meant, because the Dutchman had gone down with his ship the winter before.

Three seasons on, the Mirrow went out in a fog thick enough to lean on, and Hobb stood at the bow chanting those strange words over the black water. His grandson Pell, eleven years old and always scribbling, asked him what they meant. Hobb laughed and said it meant mend your net, lad, the sea is keeping count. The boy didn't follow, so he copied the words onto the back of a tide table in pencil, so he'd remember to ask again.

The Mirrow came home at dawn with her sail in ribbons and Hobb asleep against the tiller, his oilskin still dripping with that same sentence. Pell still has the tide table. Mend the net, he tells his children, and every count comes round in the end. Now, who's buying the next round, because I've talked enough for one tide.