Latin Tattoo Quotes

Mathis has a flower tattoo on her forearm with the words Acta Non Verba, which is Latin, she told me, for “Do shit. Don’t just talk about it.

The tendency for “like to attract like” that is seen throughout nature, inanimate objects, and human behavior is what is often referred to as the “Law of Resonance.” Resonance is the magical energetic phenomenon that attracts us to similar things in our lives. The word “resonance” is derived from the Latin word “resonantia,” which means “echo,” or from the root “resonare” — to “sound again.

Remus hovered behind Mia. He ran his fingers over the Latin words, sending a shiver down her spine. "I like yours," he whispered, a small growl in the back of his throat that only she could hear. "Vita frui vita vivet. What's that mean?" "It means 'live life and enjoy life.'" She smiled brightly and turned to kiss him, though Remus would not have been able to tell why she was so affectionate with him over a tattoo. "I consider them my own personal House words. House Mia.

1495: Salamanca The First Word from America Elio Antonio de Nebrija, language scholar, publishes here his “Spanish-Latin Vocabulary.” The dictionary includes the first Americanism of the Castilian language: Canoa: Boat made from a single timber. The new word comes from the Antilles. These boats without sails, made of the trunk of a ceiba tree, welcomed Christopher Columbus. Out from the islands, paddling canoes, came the men with long black hair and bodies tattooed with vermilion symbols. They approached the caravels, offered fresh water, and exchanged gold for the kind of little tin bells that sell for a copper in Castile. (52

I want to believe all of that, just as I want to believe that one morning in the ninth century a Scottish king looked up and saw St. Andrew’s diagonal cross in the sky above—white clouds against a blue sky—and took it as a sign to march outnumbered against the Angles. His vision and victory gave birth to the Scottish flag—white × against a blue backdrop—and is too good a story to not be true. And I want to believe that the patron saint of golfers did actually utter St. Andrews’ town motto as his final words, the Latin phrase now stitched into my putter cover and the only tattoo I might ever get: Dum Spiro Spero. While I breathe, I hope.

In the early years of the Civil War, she continued to lecture and make other celebrity appearances. She visited the Old Ladies Home in New York City, where she bought a needlepoint bookmark in the shape of a Latin cross. She shopped in Boston. She visited the Abbotts in 1863. And in 1864, she learned that the Mohave leader who had orchestrated her adoption into the tribe was coming east. After a chain of events on the Colorado that Olive could never have imagined during her life as a Mohave, Irataba, now a Mohave diplomat and leader revered by whites, was in the city after a visit with President Lincoln in Washington. She bought herself a ticket to see him.

What was Latin and the chance of tattooing compared to this?

I'd asked my father once what had possessed him to name me after a month, and particularly such a dead, frost-eaten month as January, and if there were any more normal-sounding names I could have instead. It is a good name, he'd said, rubbing his tattoos. And when I pressed him: Your mother liked it. The meaning of it. (Don't bother looking up the meaning. Webster's says: The first month of the year, containing thirty-one days. L. Januarius, fr. Janus, an antiquated Latin deity. How enlightening.)

I watched him, mesmerized. The ink of his tattoos bespoke the path he’d walked to get to me. A skull and crossbones on his hip. His daughter’s initial on one side of his chest and the words ‘Sine metu’ on the other. I’d learned Latin in college and I knew it meant ‘without fear’.

After the season, I applied for a position with the North Cascades smoke jumpers in Washington State and got a new tattoo on my left forearm, a tattoo of my life, with the motto “Mundis Ex Igne Factus Est,” which means “The World Is Made of Fire” in Latin, a quote from a Helprin book (A Soldier in the Great War) that I had read maybe five years earlier. It captured the idea that life is born of struggle and striving, that true joy and understanding do not come from comfort and safety; they come from epiphany born in exhaustion (and not exhaustion for its own sake). Safety and comfort are mortal danger to the soul.