Close photo of the word "breathe." tattooed in a typewriter-style font in black ink across the inner wrist of a hand.

Breathe lettering on the inner wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows a hand turned palm up, with the word "breathe." in lowercase letters across the inner wrist. The letters use a typewriter-style serif font with even spacing and a full stop at the end. The ink is a dark blue-black, the background is pale and soft-focus, and the tattoo sits near the centre of the frame.

Lettering Forearm Breathe Word Typewriter font Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The typewriter lives in the potting shed now, on an upturned crate between the seed trays, its keys gone green at the edges from the damp. You found it during the spring clear-out, under a sack of bone meal, and carried it out into the light the way you might carry a bird with a broken wing. Nobody else in the family wanted it. Your aunt had typed her letters to the council about the hedge on it for forty years, and every one of them ended with the same word, which she never once explained.

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You sit down with it on a Tuesday, when the rain has finally stopped and the runner beans are standing up straight for the first time since June. The ribbon is dry. You feed a sheet of paper under the roller and type nothing for a long while. The bell on the carriage waits with you. Outside, a blackbird works through the leaf litter, stops, and works again.

Eventually your finger finds the lowercase keys one at a time, slow as someone reading another person's handwriting: b, r, e, a, t, h, e. Then the full stop, struck harder than you meant, so the paper dents under it. You pull the sheet out and hold it to the window. The letters sit in a neat line, even as fence palings, and you realise the word was never an instruction. It was the thing she said to you the summer you were small and sat too still among the sweet peas, waiting to be told you could move.

You fold the page twice, slip it into the drawer with the seed packets, and step outside, where the blackbird has gone quiet and the beans lean, very slightly, towards the sun.