Black lettering reading Via Veritas Vita, in a blackletter-style font, across the inner forearm against a red fabric background.

Via Veritas Vita lettering on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a forearm with the three-line phrase Via Veritas Vita tattooed in black ink, the words stacked and centred on the arm. The letterforms have a slightly uneven, hand-drawn character with a gothic or blackletter influence, and the ink reads as solid black with no colour. The skin is pale and evenly lit, set against a bright red fabric that fills the background.

Lettering Forearm Latin phrase Text Quote Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The third line would not sit straight. Old Aldous had cut the first two words over the postern arch at Hollin Keep in a single wet morning, the V's deep and square like a pair of folded hands, but the stone under VITA was grained with a seam of flint and the chisel kept skating toward the lower edge. I knelt on the planks with a bucket of lime-wash and a rag, waiting to be told what to do with my hands.

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He would not let me touch the letters. He sat on the cart's tailboard, chewing a sprig of rosemary he kept for the cold, and said the words were older than the walls and I was not to make them prettier than they were. 'Veritas is the hard one,' he said. 'Everyone wants to round the R. The truth has corners.' So I watched him tap the flint out with the bevel of the chisel, one small crack at a time, until the stroke ran true.

When the roof went in the autumn gales, the postern was the only thing left standing, and the carters who came after brought their own readings of it. One swore the way meant the road south to the coast. Another said the truth was the bishop's ledger, burned in the hall, and the life was whatever a man could drag out through the smoke. I never corrected them. I only remembered what Aldous told me, that the lines were stacked so the eye would drop down through them and meet the middle first.

I cannot say whether he was right. These days I find myself reading the stone the way he taught me, starting at the hard word and working outward, the chisel marks still bright where the flint gave way. Veritas holds up the other two. Without its corners, the way would have nothing to lead to, and the life would be only rubble under a gate.