᚛ᚇᚑ ᚑᚏ ᚇᚑ ᚅᚑᚈ ᚈᚆᚓᚏᚓ ᚔᚄ ᚅᚑ ᚈᚏᚆ᚜

The above is meant to say "Do or do not. There is no try." is that accurate? Also I'd like it vertical instead of horizontal for tattoo placement.

Thanks so much!

Slainte,

(The Mighty) Quinn,

There is one problem that's apparent to me, and a few more points you may not be aware of.

The problem is that the ogham alphabet does not contain an equivalent letter for y. This means that the word "try" cannot be rendered in ogham. What is happening in the ogham you have there is that the letter h is being used at the very end of the string of letters, instead of y.

A few other things you should know about ogham:

1. It was usually written in Prehistoric or Old Irish.
2. On stone (written vertically) it read from bottom to top, not top to bottom.
3. It generally only contained names of people.
4. There was no punctuation.

As an alphabet to be notched into stone, ogham wasn't designed for writing long texts or phrases. Anything more than names were just too long. Now, while the phrase you're looking for isn't particularly long, you should be aware it would be somewhat unusual to have such a phrase written in ogham. Many people who look for tattoos like this do so because they feel some tie to Ireland, or have an Irish heritage. Generally, in these cases authenticity of tattoo subjects is important to the person getting the tattoo, and phrases like this wouldn't be particularly authentic in ogham from a historic perspective.

Similarly, while the phrase you're looking for is rendered in ogham above (with the exception of the letter y), it is still written in English. Again, if this is what you wanted, then it's no problem, but if you were looking for something more authentic, you may want to consider having the sentiment translated into Irish (or better yet, old Irish) first, then rendering it in ogham. This may even eliminate the issue with missing letters like y.

Because of the lack of punctuation in ogham, if you were to translate what you've written in your opening post back into the Latin alphabet it would read: doordonotthereisnotrh

If you were to try to force punctuation or spacing in, you would again end up with a less authentic rendering of your phrase into ogham. Similarly, as ogham was written from bottom to top, doing otherwise would not only be inauthentic, but incorrect. As such, written bottom to top, your current phrase would look like:
h
r
t
o
n
s
i
e
r
e
h
t
t
o
n
o
d
r
o
o
d

Thank you so much for your answer. I knew there were letters that Irish, let alone Ogham does not have, though wasn't aware of y being one of them. I knew 2 of the 4 points mentioned, though it not being used for phrases doesn't surprise me.

Aside from being a celtophile, I'm at least 25% Irish as far as lineage is concerned. In this instance, the phrase is the meaningful part of the tattoo. While authenticity is a very close second. After all, I don't want to appear uneducated w/ the ink on my body for the rest of my life Oghma being the God of eloquence & scholarship etc. etc. What are your thoughts on my using google translate to translate the phrase into Irish, then getting rid of the spaces & changing its written orientation?

I would suggest that you should definitely not use Google to translate the phrase. Machine translation is useful for getting a sense of what a foreign language text is saying, however it can not come close to giving a natural translation. To get a sense of this, find a chunk of text in a language you're unfamiliar with, and translate it into English using google. Then imagine having a tattoo which was translated to that same standard.

Generally the members on this site are more than happy to provide translations if requested. There are a number of ways a phrase can be translated. To start off, a direct, literal translation might be something like:

Déan nó ná déan, níl iarracht ann.

Please wait for another member to confirm this, at least. Other members may be able to offer better, idiomatic translations or comparable proverbs of which I'm unaware.

thank you. Is that the translation of the phrase? Would you be willing to translate it for me? (I understand I need several members to confirm a translation & will wait until at least then before contacting a tattoo parlor)