Black script lettering reading Valar Morghulis with flourished capitals, tattooed across the inner forearm in a lettering style.

Valar Morghulis script on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo is written in flowing cursive script that reads Valar Morghulis, with looped and swashed capitals and a long underline stroke. The linework is solid black with some grey shading in the thicker strokes, and the lettering runs diagonally across the inner forearm. The skin is pale and the background is a blue-grey woven surface, with a small second tattoo partly visible at the right edge.

Lettering Forearm Script Lettering Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Put the peel down, Maud, and listen, because the dough won't rise any faster for your fidgeting. Your grandmother had a saying for the men who came to the back door before the bells, the ones who wanted bread on credit and a kind word besides. Valar morghulis, she'd say, and she'd press a warm cob into their hands. All men must die. Then she'd add, and mind this part, all men must eat first.

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The winter the Carrick Street mill burned, there was no flour in the town but what Ida kept under the bench. A man came with a wooden leg and a bundle of letters, asking for one loaf for his brother, who lay dying in the workhouse. She said no. She had eleven mouths of her own and a debt to the miller. He went off into the sleet, and she shut the shutter and sat down beside the cold oven and wept into her apron.

Near four, the knock came again. It wasn't the man. It was the brother himself, carried on a handcart by the same man's two boys, grey as ash and barely breathing. He said he'd come to pay for the bread he'd never had, and he held out the only coin he owned, a tin token stamped with a sheaf of wheat. Ida fed the fire that morning and didn't ask his name. She baked until the light came up over the harbour.

Every morning since, the starter has sat on the top shelf with a chalk mark for each name she lost, and the first customer gets the saying with their change. They laugh at her, and they eat. So the bread's ready now. Fetch the cloth and mind the hot tins.