Black text tattoo of a fatal exception error message running along a raised forearm and upper arm, set in a monospaced typewriter-style font.

Blue screen error message tattoo on arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows a close view of a raised arm with a block of black text tattooed from the upper arm down to the forearm. The text reads as a computer fatal exception error message, with lines beginning 'Press any key to terminate the current application' and 'Press CTRL-ALT-DEL again to restart your computer'. The lettering is crisp, monochrome and set in a monospaced font, with the skin tone and slight curvature of the arm visible across the composition.

Lettering Upper arm Forearm Text Typewriter font

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Rain had fallen on Saltergate market for nine days, and the stallholders had stopped pretending it was weather. Tobias Rell kept his valves and dead radios under a tarpaulin, where the drips ran off the edge in a neat row. On the Tuesday the grey set on his bench began to speak. It did not sing or crackle like the old ones. It gave a flat, typed sentence about a fatal exception and a place in the memory, then asked him to press a key.

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Tobias did not press anything. His wife Ada had told him as a girl that a machine which talks in a language it was not built for is either lying or grieving. He wrapped the set in a bread cloth and carried it through the rain to Mabel Crane, who sold clocks and sorrow at the far end of the arcade. Mabel listened with her head on one side and said the set was not broken, only saying where it had stopped.

They sat together under her awning and listened to the rain on the canvas while the set repeated its message until the words were worn into the room. The current application will be terminated. Mabel said the market had been like that since her mother's day, a place where people stopped halfway through a sentence and were asked to begin again, and nobody argued with the rain.

Tobias took the set home at dusk and set it on the windowsill. He did not restart it. He opened the back, found the small brass screw that held the grief in, and turned it one notch looser. The next morning the rain had stopped, and the set said only, in a steady typed voice, Press any key to continue. He did.