Greetings experts!

I'll be in Ireland this May with my wife, parents, and siblings, and we will all be getting tattoos together. I want to get a tattoo that's specific to our marriage and I love the ogham alphabet.

I'm concerned about relying on my own online research abilities and am hoping this group would be willing to help me translate "with this wing" into Old Irish and ultimately spelled out using Ogham.

Long story very short, during our wedding ceremony I accidently stated "with this wing" instead of "with this ring". An experience that has remained a wonderful inside joke between the two of us and everyone who attended the ceremony.

I sincerely appreciate any and all assistance you're willing to provide! Thanks so much,

Brian

Are you the guitarist from Thin Lizzy?

Just to be sure before giving you a translation, when you say Old Irish, you're looking for something resembling the Irish that would have been used between the 7th and 9th centuries, yes?

Hahaha! If only!

Yes, I put down Old Irish as my understanding was that it would be the closest and easiest translation to use with the ogham alphabet.

If that’s incorrect, I am all ears! Leaning heavy on you all with this one.

Thanks so much!

Ogham can be as easily applied to Old Irish as to Modern, only more people may be able to interpret a Modern Irish tattoo than an Old Irish one. But, there's nothing that makes Old Irish more suited to Ogham than Modern.

In any case, I think the Old Irish would be lasin scíathsa (ᚂᚐᚄᚔᚅ ᚄᚉᚔᚐᚈᚆᚄᚐ). I'm a little unsure whether there should be u-inflection in the dative case, scíuth, but I haven't been able to find any examples of such a form, while I have of scíath following prepositions.

Modern Irish would be leis an sciathán seo (ᚂᚓᚔᚄ ᚐᚅ ᚄᚉᚔᚐᚈᚆᚐᚅ ᚄᚓᚑ).

Just as an interesting aside to show how similar Old and Modern Irish can be: A variant spelling that would be acceptable in Old Irish would be lasin sciathso (ᚂᚐᚄᚔᚅ ᚄᚉᚔᚐᚈᚆᚄᚑ), as marks of vowel length were often omitted in manuscripts, and the final vowel was a little ambiguous. Modern Irish in the Munster dialect would render leis an sciath so (ᚂᚓᚔᚄ ᚐᚅ ᚄᚉᚔᚐᚈᚆ ᚄᚑ), which makes use of a variant word for wing, sciath, which is less common in Modern Irish than in Old, but still perfectly acceptable. These renderings are extremely close both phonetically and orthographically, only that Old Irish often didn't include spacing between certain words (lasin = la + sin, and sciathso = sciath + so).

Wow! I can’t thank you enough for the linguistics lesson and your assistance with my translation request! You’ve been an amazing help!