Close photo of the words 'choose life.' in black typewriter-style lettering on the inner upper arm.

Choose life lettering on an upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The photo shows the words 'choose life.' tattooed in black lowercase letters with a typewriter-style serif typeface across the inner upper arm. The linework is clean and solid with no visible shading, and the ink sits in a single horizontal line with a full stop at the end. The arm is raised against a pale background, with dark hair and a dark top at the edge of the frame.

Lettering Upper arm Text Typewriter font Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

At Hollin Keep the old lord had three sons, and when the crown's man rode up the hill with a sealed letter, the eldest was out hunting and the middle one was drunk, so it was Matthew, the youngest, who broke the wax. The letter said the keep was to be pulled down stone by stone and the land given to the abbey at Wenlow. Matthew read it twice in the wind, then folded it small the way his mother used to fold the rent receipts.

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That night a grey woman came up the causeway carrying a tin box of loose metal letters, the kind a printer keeps in a drawer. She said she had walked from the sea, where the old kings had drowned their gold, and that what remained was not gold but a single sentence. She laid the letters out on the kitchen table, two words and a stop, and told him the price was that he must say them aloud at the gatehouse every morning, whether anyone heard or not. Matthew asked what they meant. She tapped the box and said he would know when he had need of them.

The brothers laughed at him for a year. The abbey carts came, and the stones came down a wall at a time until only the gatehouse stood. Matthew stayed on the hill. Each morning he stood under the arch and said the words to the larks, and the larks did not care. His brothers went down to the coast for work and did not write.

In the spring the abbey's cart broke an axle on the hill road, and the carter, a boy no older than Matthew had been, sat on the gatehouse step and wept into his sleeve. Matthew gave him bread and water. When the boy asked what the old man's words were, Matthew told him, and the boy looked at the broken keep as if it were the first honest thing he had seen all day. He went home to his mother, and the abbey never sent another cart up the hill. Matthew kept the box, and the gate, and the last word.