Close-up of a black typewriter-style lettering tattoo reading choose life with a full stop, on a section of pale skin.

Choose life lettering tattoo

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

The image shows the words "choose life." in a black typewriter-style font, set across two lines with the full stop at the end. The linework is solid and even, with the letters filled in black and minimal grey shading. The tattoo fills most of the frame against a soft-focus background of pale skin, and the body part is not clearly identifiable.

Lettering Other Text Quote Typewriter font

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The machine in the corner of the council annexe has a habit of dropping its e's, so by half past four you are typing every other word with a hitch in it, pressing harder than you ought. Mr Haskins wants the notice for the Methodist hall typed fair by morning, and he has left you his scrawl on the back of a seed catalogue, the letters leaning like fence posts in a gale.

Keep reading

Near the bottom, in pencil, he has written the words he wants printed beneath the bingo rota. Choose life. You ask him whether he means the bingo, or the sermon he gave last Sunday, or the new picture house on Market Street with its red velvet seats. He says he means exactly what he wrote, that the young ones down at the dance hall need reminding, and you type it because the wage is paid on Friday whatever the words say.

The letters come out black and even, the way type always does when it is meant for other people. Your stuck e comes out fine on the notice, a little blurred at the edges, which Mr Haskins will not notice and you are glad of. On Saturday the rain will drive the lads from the dance hall under the hall porch, and one of them, the Carter boy who went to the station in his brother's coat, will stand in the lamplight and read it aloud to nobody.

You pull the sheet from the platen and find that the final full stop has not printed at all. You fit a fresh strip of carbon, wind the paper back a line, and press the key until the stop sits there, dented into the page, as firm as the one he wrote in pencil.