Close-up of black typewriter-style capital lettering reading ABBA FATHER across the inner forearm of a light-skinned arm resting on white bedding.

ABBA FATHER lettering on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The image shows the words ABBA FATHER tattooed in black capital letters with a slab-serif, typewriter-like typeface across the inner forearm. The lines are crisp and even, with a small amount of soft shading visible in the ink. The arm rests on a plain white sheet, and the lettering sits near the centre of the frame, with the text running horizontally along the forearm.

Lettering Forearm Text Typewriter font Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The machine had been Mr Haddow's before it was mine, and it still remembered him. The capital A stuck on the downstroke unless you struck it twice, and I had learned the trick the way you learn which tap runs cold. That Tuesday in March the post brought a foreign envelope with no return address beyond a postmark from Haifa, and inside was a single sheet in a hand so careful it looked engraved. Mr Haddow had retired to Bridlington. The partners left the letter on my blotter with a note asking for a fair copy for the probate court, and would I mind.

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The letter was in English, mostly, but the writer had kept one word in his own tongue and underlined it twice. Abba. Beneath it, in the same careful hand, was a sentence I typed three times before I trusted it: he had walked to the well every morning for forty years and called down into the dark for his son, and the son had never once answered, and still he kept calling. I did not know whether Abba meant father to the writer or simply a man who had been waited for. I typed the word exactly as written, striking the A twice.

The court wanted the copy by Friday. On Thursday evening I walked to the station with the carbon in my bag, and a boy on the platform asked me the time in a language I did not know. He said the same word to the man beside him, and the man laughed and put a hand on the boy's head. I stood there long after my train had gone. At home I took the typewriter apart on the kitchen table, oiled the A bar until it fell cleanly, and typed the word once more, just once, and left it sitting on the page where anyone could read it.