Small black typewriter-style lettering reading Be good across the middle finger of a hand, in a lettering style.

Be good lettering on a finger

Lettering · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a hand with the words Be good tattooed across the top of the middle finger in a typewriter-style serif font. The letters are solid black with slightly soft edges, and the finger is held up against a pale fabric background. The image is warmly lit with a dark vignette around the edges, and the tattoo is the clear focal point.

Lettering Hand Text Typewriter font Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

No, sit by the stove. The bench is warm where Brother Anselm used to leave it, and you will hear better from there. Now. The machine on the side table is a Remington, and it came up the valley road in a carter's cart the winter the bell cracked. Every letter this house sent to the bishop after that passed under its hammers. Anselm fed it paper with his good right hand, because two fingers on his left would never straighten, and he swore at the keys in Latin, which the keys did not mind.

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Every boy who left for the mills in the valley got a sheet from him before he went. The abbot wanted a blessing typed out in full, with the saints listed in order. Anselm gave them a single line instead, struck clean along the platen. When the novices asked why he wasted good ink on so little, he only shrugged and said a blessing is a long thing to carry down a hill, but two words fit in a pocket. Be good. That was all he ever typed at the foot of those sheets. The boys laughed at it, and then they carried it for forty years.

Tomas was the last of them to go, and the last to come back. He was a foreman by then, grey at the temples, with a coat that smelled of machine oil, and he stood in the doorway holding a sheet folded small. Anselm had been dead a month. The young brother who showed him in pointed at the table, where the ribbon had dried and the keys had gone stiff. Tomas did not sit down. He wound a clean sheet into the roller, pressed the B with a finger that had once been too clumsy for it, and typed the two words again, slowly, the g sticking as it always had.

He folded the new sheet into his pocket beside the old one and said, to nobody in particular, that he had been good, mostly. Then he went back down the hill, and the bell, which nobody had ever mended, rang once behind him.