Small black lettering reading be here now on the inner wrist and forearm, with a grey sleeve and brown shoes visible in the frame.

Be here now lettering on the inner wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows the phrase be here now written in lowercase black lettering with a typewriter-style serif font, sitting on the inner wrist and forearm. The lines are fine and even, and the ink appears crisp against the pale skin. A grey knit sleeve covers the upper edge of the frame, and brown leather shoes appear at the bottom, with the text placed centrally and clearly legible.

Lettering Forearm Text Phrase Typewriter font

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The machine came to me in a tea chest, wrapped in a bath towel that smelled of pipe smoke. Someone had written on the masking tape across the lid: Edith, do not hurry. Nothing else. I cleaned the type bars with a toothbrush and a drop of paraffin, freed a carriage that had been seized for thirty years, and on the third evening I rolled a sheet of onionskin in and tapped out the only words the machine seemed to want to make, slow as a clock: be here now.

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I took it up to Edith Tregear, who was ninety-one and lived over the chemist on Fore Street. I expected her to laugh. She didn't. She sat at her kitchen table with both hands flat on the oilcloth and told me her husband had typed a line like that every morning for forty years, on the back of the milk ledger, because he kept forgetting she was in the next room and he was already halfway down to the harbour in his head. She said he was a good man and a terrible listener.

I asked her what she wanted me to do with the machine. She said to leave the ribbon in. We sat while the kettle went cold, and she talked about the winter the lighthouse lamp failed and he walked her home in the rain, naming each paving slab aloud so she would know where her feet were. Then she reached over, rolled a fresh sheet into the carriage and typed the line herself, one finger at a time, pressing hard enough that the letters bit through the paper.

I drove home without the radio on. I didn't type anything that night. I sat in my own kitchen with a mug going lukewarm and listened to the clock in the hall, and for once I didn't wait for whatever was coming next.