RIP Tattoo Ideas and Memorial Lettering

What a memorial lettering tattoo means

RIP is the most compressed memorial there is: three letters and no picture. It stands for requiescat in pace, may he or she rest in peace, and the English happens to fit the same three letters, so it reads correctly to people who have never met the Latin. Worn alone or over a rose it says that someone is gone. What it does not say is who, and most wearers add a name, a date or both.

The phrases people choose follow a handful of formulas, and each carries a slightly different weight. In loving memory is the headstone opening, formal and complete. Gone but not forgotten and until we meet again are older epitaphs that say something about the wearer as well as the dead, the first a promise and the second a belief. Forever in my heart, always with me and you are missed are newer and more private, written to the person rather than about them. None is more correct than another; the choice is between speaking to someone and speaking of them.

Much memorial lettering is not a phrase at all but one word, the name the person was called by. Mom, Dad, Mama, Papa, Grandma and Abuela are on this page because they are what people actually write, and the right one is the word you used, not the formal version. A mother who was Mum in London, Mam in Cardiff or Mom in Ohio should stay that way on skin. A pet memorial follows the same logic: the name the animal answered to, like the Buddy here beside a paw print.

The drawing carries less of the meaning than it does on most tattoos, and that is deliberate. A dove, a feather, a heartbeat line, a pair of wings or an anchor for a father who held things steady sets the tone, while the lettering does the naming. That division is the reason to spend the care on the letters: a slightly awkward feather is forgiven, and a misspelt name is read every day.

Where the design comes from

The words come from the churchyard. Early Christian burials in the Roman catacombs carry the short blessing in pace, in peace, and the fuller requiescat in pace grew out of the Latin prayers for the dead; by the eighteenth century it was a fixture of Christian gravestones. English headstone wording changed over the next hundred years. Georgian stones tend to open Sacred to the memory of, and by the later Victorian decades the standard opening had softened to In loving memory, in the era of mourning cards and mourning jewellery, and of Queen Victoria, who wore black for forty years after Prince Albert died in 1861. Tattooed tributes grew up alongside: the heart with a banner reading MOTHER or MOM is among the oldest designs on American traditional flash, and it began not as a memorial but as something sailors wore for the mother they had left at home.

Choosing yours

• Take the spelling from a document, not from memory: a birth certificate, an order of service, a headstone. The errors that reach skin are rarely typos in common words. They are the second n in Ann, the accent on María or José, a nickname spelt the way the family said it rather than the way it was registered. For a name in another script, Hebrew, Arabic, Greek or Cyrillic, have someone who reads that script check the final drawing the artist will stencil, not only the reference you sent.
• Write the dates so that they cannot be misread. Years alone, 1952 to 2023, mean the same thing everywhere; a date in digits does not, since 03/04 is the third of April in Britain and the fourth of March in America. Spell the month, or give only the years. The mark between the years has its own poem, Linda Ellis's The Dash, read at a great many funerals, and it deserves a little space: a typewriter face uses a plain hyphen, and a serif can take a longer dash with a space either side, closer to the look of cut stone.
• Size the words by the thinnest stroke, not the tallest letter. A fine cursive line such as forever in my heart has hairlines that soften within a few years, so three or four words in that hand want roughly 8 cm of length or more for the small letters to stay open. Blackletter RIP or block capitals survive at a fraction of that. Decide, too, who is reading: a line on the inner forearm can face you or face everyone else, and memorial words are the one case where many people choose to read them themselves.

Common questions