Black and white photo of the inner arm with the Latin phrase Cogito Ergo Sum tattooed in a typewriter-style serif font.

Cogito ergo sum lettering on inner arm

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows the Latin phrase Cogito Ergo Sum in a typewriter-style serif typeface on the inner arm. The lettering is crisp, solid black and evenly spaced across the centre of the frame. The image is greyscale, with soft shadows on the skin and a plain pale background.

Lettering Other Phrase Quote Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the third step, it's loose, and don't let the lift take your coat, it has a taste for wool. Sit there, by the window, where the car park lights come on at four. Now. You want the typewriter story. Everyone wants the typewriter, and nobody wants the rest of it.

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Walter Brough kept an Imperial in his flat on the nineteenth floor of Cordwell House, its black enamel worn brown at the keys. Every evening at nine he fed it one sheet, typed one sentence, folded the sheet into an aeroplane and sent it down the rubbish chute, which the council had forbidden him to use for anything but rubbish. The sentences were dull on purpose. Bus times. The price of bread. Rain coming in from the west. He said a man could only be sure of a thing he had said out loud, and the chute was as close to out loud as the building allowed.

Then one February a sheet came back up. It had been slid under his door from the eleventh floor, in pencil, in a round hand: Who types for the chute? Nadia, Flat 11, and so began two years of paper and draughts. He kept her notes in a biscuit tin. She kept his sentences in a shoebox. Neither ever asked to meet, because the building had taught them that a face in a lift could spoil a good thing.

The last sheet he typed before the hospital had three words, the g struck twice where the bar jammed. Cogito ergo sum. When the council men came to clear the flat, the tin held nothing but an aeroplane, unfolded and pressed flat so often the ink had bled into the creases. I still have the shoebox. It's under my chair. Go on, lift the lid and read the bottom sheet aloud, then mind the step on your way out.