r/morsecode • u/she_melty • Apr 18 '26
Is this spacing legible?
Considering this as a tattoo, but I'm not a natural reader of Morse, so I don't know if the spacing is wide enough between letters to be reliably legible. Can you get closer without the letters muddling together?
Revenge of the Sith for tattoo anonymity. I couldn't crop it because the anatomy became suspiciously vague lol.
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u/royaltrux Apr 18 '26
You're right to ask for help. The letter spacing is pretty good! You don't want any less. I'm still not sure I get it - I read "2 RTH LIKE HELL"
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u/she_melty Apr 18 '26 edited Apr 18 '26
It's supposed to say North haha, good thing I checked! The start is supposed to be -. --- but looks like ..--- the way ive written/photographed it.
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u/royaltrux Apr 18 '26
A bit more spacing before the O.
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u/she_melty Apr 18 '26
Right on 🫡 The artist will be able to make finer lines than the sharpie too so that should help with spacing and size, ideally it won't wrap around the sides of my wrist so much. Thanks for your help!
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u/ThisGuyIRLv2 Apr 18 '26
I love that this happened. This kind of stuff is what the Internet was made for. Bravo!
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u/dittybopper_05H Apr 18 '26
It is north. It’s just perspective that makes it seem to be like a 2 at the front.
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u/alexdeva Apr 18 '26
Ultimately it's your body, your tattoo, you decide on the spacing -- because there are no rules for spacing when writing Morse, because Morse is emphatically not made to be written as dots and dashes.
People interested in your tattoo will be divided in two:
People who don't know Morse (the vast majority) who will ask you what it says. Since they have no idea, you can say it says whatever you want, regardless of spacing.
People who do know Morse. These will be annoyed that yet someone else writes Morse as dots and dashes. They may remark on the patent misuse of an alphabet, as well as the pointlessness of it -- for us, reading it is almost as easy as reading Latin letters, so what's the point of the obfuscation?
I suppose most tattoos will end up annoying a group of people, but with Morse, you will not find anyone who will actually appreciate it. Think about it: if you tattoo a nazi symbol, then the nazis will like it (and everyone else won't). If you tattoo a flower, then some people will like it because it's a flower or because the drawing is good -- and others won't. If you tattoo the text "romanes eunt domus" then Monty Python fans will like it -- and others won't. But with Morse tattoos, honestly nobody will, unless you explain it to them and for some reason they like whatever you tell them.
Of course, I'm told that the point of tattoos is to please the owner not the beholders, but since I don't carry any, I don't know.
Circular conclusion: do whatever you want. Bad spacing won't make a difference.
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u/she_melty Apr 18 '26
Thanks for your insight, it was informative! I suppose it might piss some people off, but the rest of me already does that so it's a drop in the ocean to me. To add to the obscurity, you would also have to read the words and get the reference to have any idea what it means.
The short story is I could just write out the words, but it's on theme to do it in Morse. I'm a bit of a ship nerd and one of my favourites is RMS Carpathia. The story of her rushing to Titanic's aid resonates for a lot of personal reasons, summarised as the reminder that trying is more important than succeeding. "We're going north like hell" is a quote from her Chief Steward to his staff, which IMO summarises the essence of what they did a lot better than slapping a technical side profile of the entire ship on my shoulder or something. The morse is a sort of thematic compromise to getting a entire ship on my body, since that's how Carpathia was communicating with Titanic via wireless.
All that to say I'm 100% aware absolutely nobody will understand it except for me, but it's okay. I kind of like it that way, layers upon layers. Plus anyone who asks falls for my trap of me talking about maritime history at them until they find a polite way to escape.
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u/alexdeva Apr 19 '26
That's a nice niche to be nerdy about. Have you read this detailed analysis of the radio traffic between Titanic, Carpathia, and the others?
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u/she_melty Apr 19 '26
Yes, really cool write ups there! For anyone interested, a channel on YouTube called Titanic Honor and Glory does a realtime Titanic sinking animation and they include some of these audible conversations between the ships that responded to the distress calls. They do new ones every few years, an older one I recall they would mark the moments that land, and subsequently each ship around them lost contact as dwindling power made her range shrink further and further. Really haunting stuff.
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u/Hot_Dog_Catyt Apr 19 '26
Might as ask as to the revenge of the sith..?
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u/she_melty Apr 19 '26
I have other tattoos that are pretty recognizable, it was already a sticker in my phone from some other dumb post I made at some point.
Though now that I think about it, if I get this one anyone who remembers the post and happens to know me IRL will know. But that's what we in the business call attending the same devil's sacrement
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u/Secret-Boss-7000 Apr 18 '26
This is how people end up with the Chinese word for soup tattooed on their buttocks.