Black script lettering reading Veni Vidi Vici on a plain white background, shown as a tattoo design in a fine line lettering style.

Veni Vidi Vici in script lettering

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

The image shows the Latin phrase Veni Vidi Vici written in flowing black cursive script across three words on a plain white background. The letterforms have fine hairline strokes, looped capitals and tapered thick and thin contrast, with no shading or fill. The composition is centred and horizontal with generous white space around the text, as a clean stencil or flash-style design would be.

Lettering Script Latin phrase Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dispatch came up from the port at the second hour, wet at one corner where the courier had leaned on a barrel. Marcus Oppius wanted it copied fair before the senate saw the original, and he wanted it done in the book hand, not the scrawl the clerks use for grain tallies. So I sat at the window ledge with the good reed and a pot of ink thinned with vinegar, because black sits flatter that way, and I began.

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The general had written only three words at the head of the letter, the rest being numbers of carts and dead men, which he left to the clerks. I wrote Veni first, and the V gave me trouble. Old Gaius taught me to loop the top of a capital so the stroke seems thrown rather than drawn, a habit that makes a letter look as if the hand moved faster than the man who sent it. I looped the V twice, then once more, until it leaned like a sail taking wind.

When the ink dried I held the sheet to the light and saw that the hairline strokes had nearly vanished, the thin lines that lift a word off the page. I could have thickened them, and no one in the senate would have known. Instead I lightened my hand and let the fine lines run as far as the reed allowed, so that anyone reading across the three words would feel the pull from one to the next and would not stop to admire any single one.

Vidi and Vici went down quickly after that. At the foot of the last word I set the dot over the i a fingerwidth off the line, a small flourish scribes make when pleased with a day's work. The courier came for the fair copy at dusk. He could not read Latin well, he said, but he knew those three words, and he said them back to me as if they were a password, grinning all the way down the stairs.