Black and white photo of the words All monsters are human in a typewriter-style font tattooed on the inner forearm, with a checked shirt sleeve rolled up above it.

All monsters are human lettering on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The image shows a forearm with the words "All monsters are human" set on two lines in a serif typewriter-style font. The black ink is crisp and even, with clean edges and no visible shading, and the skin is pale with some fine hair. The photograph is in black and white, with a rolled-up gingham shirt sleeve filling the upper part of the frame against a dark background.

Lettering Forearm Lettering Text Script Typewriter font

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dorothy Quayle brought the typewriter to the shop in a biscuit tin, wrapped in a tea towel as if it might catch cold. Ben Asquith had been repairing machines above a Halifax bakery for nineteen years, and he knew the sound a typewriter makes when something inside has given up. This one had a stiff capital A and an e that refused to rise.

Keep reading

It was the e that took him the best part of a week. He stripped the carriage, cleaned the type bar with a wire brush, and found, folded flat under the platen felt, a square of carbon paper gone brittle at the edges. Someone had typed on it without a sheet over the top, so the letters came through backwards. He held it to the lamp and read them in reverse: a list of foundry shifts, a name he didn't know, and at the bottom, typed twice, All monsters are human. The second time, the e had been struck so hard it cut the paper.

When Dorothy came back on Friday, he asked. Her husband Walter had worked the furnaces at Anchor Mill for thirty years and typed his own letters because he didn't trust anyone else to spell his grievances. The line was for the men who came to the gate after the strike, he said, the ones the papers called animals. Walter had been dead four winters. She took the carbon, folded it into her purse, and said, Leave the e. He'd want it to be obvious it was his.

Ben set the type bar back and tested it. The e came up a little proud of the line, the way Walter must have struck it. He could have straightened it in ten minutes. Instead he wrapped the machine in its tea towel and watched Dorothy carry it down the steep stairs, one careful step at a time.