Close view of a small black fine lettering tattoo reading VENI VIDI VICI in capitals across the inner forearm.

Veni vidi vici lettering on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photo of a forearm with the Latin phrase VENI VIDI VICI written in small, evenly spaced black capitals running horizontally across the skin. The letterforms are crisp and solid with no visible shading, set against a plain skin tone, a blurred pale background and a patterned sleeve at the right edge.

Lettering Forearm Latin phrase Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fair came over Brayling Hill at Michaelmas with three painted wagons, a steam organ that wheezed in the wet, and a board nailed above the gate that read VENI VIDI VICI in square black letters as plain as a ledger. Tobias Crane, who owned the lot, had bought the board from a bankrupt circus in Lincoln for the price of a pig. He liked to say it was the only honest sentence he had ever owned, though he could not have told you what it meant.

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Every evening the lads of Thornley walked up the lane to test Gideon Mott, the wrestler who had thrown a bear in Ostend. Nobody threw him. Nell Harrow sold them their penny tickets and watched them come back grey-faced and grinning, pockets lighter, pride heavier. She read the board each night while she counted coppers, and it seemed to her the words were doing all the boasting, so that the men only had to stand beneath them.

Then one dusk a boy came up the lane without a penny. He was small and sharp-elbowed, and his name was Eli Tranter, and he said he would wrestle Gideon for the board itself. Tobias laughed until he coughed. Gideon, who was kind when nobody was watching, let the boy have a go. Eli did not push or pull. He simply sat down in the mud and said he had come to see, and would not get up until someone told him what the words meant. Nell read them aloud over the wheeze of the organ: I came, I saw, I conquered.

"Conquered what?" said Eli. Nobody answered him. At first light the fair struck its tents, and Tobias lifted the board down to load it. When he turned it over he found more lettering on the back, in the same square capitals but faded and older than the paint on the front: GONE HOME BY SUNDAY. Nell laughed so hard she had to sit on the wagon step, and the board went back on its nails facing the road, where anyone coming into Thornley could read the first half and nobody could read the rest.