This is Kate‘s tattoo.
Just got this today to celebrate my undergraduate degree… I start my English Lit masters in the fall. I wanted to get a tattoo to literally mark the occasion.
I chose [sic], “thus”; in full: sic erat scriptum, “thus it had been written.” I spent a while worrying about font, but finally decided that the only real choice was Times New Roman.
I love this! And welcome back :)
Interesting (and pretty cool) choice for a tattoo. [sic] does not mean “thus” in the sense of “therefore” or “ergo”; rather, it is used specifically to indicate language with syntactical, grammatical, or spelling errors when quoting from a source. It is a marker for the reader, noting that the author is aware of the errors, but is preserving the original language for a specific reason–that by paraphrasing (and/or editing for correctness) something might be lost.
I -never- knew the origin of (sic), thanks for explaining it!
I just got the idea to also tattoo this, but for the reason explained by James (before I viewed these images mind you – I’m not some common riffraff!). This looks really cool – but for me the only font choice is either Futura or Helvetica.